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The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

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Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#61

Post by suff »

copperx wrote: post #57
Willamin wrote: post #30

There are ways to actually run your application for free using the big players' free services. One route I've looked at for e-commerce is storing product data on Stripe, hosting product pages with Netlify, pulling product data during static site build, triggering a build when Stripe data gets updated, and using Netlify's wrapper around AWS Lambda for free FaaS (AWS Lambda can be free forever, but you also need AWS AP…

All of this work and complete dependency on third party services is worth it? Isn't much easier to create a lightweight app in say, Go and SQLite, and pay a so-low-to-be-insignificant monthly fee?

I agree. There is a diminishing return on service reliability as you approach 'free', and at some point, you finally pay $9.78/mo and survive anyway.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#62

Post by Roritharr »

copperx wrote: post #57
Willamin wrote: post #30

There are ways to actually run your application for free using the big players' free services. One route I've looked at for e-commerce is storing product data on Stripe, hosting product pages with Netlify, pulling product data during static site build, triggering a build when Stripe data gets updated, and using Netlify's wrapper around AWS Lambda for free FaaS (AWS Lambda can be free forever, but you also need AWS AP…

All of this work and complete dependency on third party services is worth it? Isn't much easier to create a lightweight app in say, Go and SQLite, and pay a so-low-to-be-insignificant monthly fee?

I wonder what amount of money would be sufficient to create the digital equivalent of a foundation to ensure the uptime of a website/project. It would be kinda cool to put away a few grand to ensure something stays up "forever".

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#63

Post by scanr »

bootlooped wrote: post #3
ameliaquining wrote: post #2

What's wrong with using RDS in production? I'd rather do that than build around a vendor-lock-in Amazon offering when not strictly necessary. I'd also rather do that than administer a database myself.

"...AWS RDS Sevice. It offers t2.micro for free during the first 12 months. It is fine for development. However, I will not recommend using it in production." I think maybe they were talking specifically about not using the t2.micro instance size in production.

Do you know what the downsides would be of using a t2.micro in production (for a low volume of requests)?

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#64

Post by pagnihotry »

Neighbor_ wrote: post #42

How would this work with a more standard webpage. For example, Laravel (PHP) on the backend with a Relational Database like MySQL?

AWS Lambda does not support PHP. You will need to spin up an EC2 instance for running PHP and another instance in RDS for MySQL. For development, you can spin up t2.micro on EC2 and RDS and pay $0 but pick another instance type when you go live to production.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#65

Post by exikyut »

Roritharr wrote: post #62
copperx wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this work and complete dependency on third party services is worth it? Isn't much easier to create a lightweight app in say, Go and SQLite, and pay a so-low-to-be-insignificant monthly fee?

I wonder what amount of money would be sufficient to create the digital equivalent of a foundation to ensure the uptime of a website/project. It would be kinda cool to put away a few grand to ensure something stays up "forever".

Well, Network Solutions seems(?) to offer 100-year domain registration for $1k ($999).

Thinking about it, a holistic solution to this kind of problem would [categorically need to] be extremely expensive in order to ratelimit demand. Because it's not just "host this for me for a while" with an implicit sort of "maybe let it fall over one day and see if I yell at you" - that 2nd bit is completely removed, and the expectation is 100.0% (amortized, aggregate) uptime... indefinitely.

It's interesting how not even graves last forever. They decay over time (hundreds of years). Not all are maintained.

What sort of "forever" are you talking about? "Most Important Thing™ when the paperclip maximisers take over"?

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#66

Post by pagnihotry »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #40
pagnihotry wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi ameliaquining, like bootlooped pointed out, I am suggesting to not use t2.micro in production and not RDS.

Hi, thanks for the write-up, very informative! What would be the lowest instance type you would recommend for a similar setup? I have an app I'm thinking of porting to AWS...

C/M should do it for general workloads in production, R/I on RDS. If you are doing something specific, you may have to look closely at the resource bottlenecks on those instances. t2.micro should be fine for development.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#67

Post by drb91 »

falcor84 wrote: post #47
swebs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't consider VPS providers part of "the cloud". You simply rent a (virtual) server. With AWS and the like, you pay for their automation of services. You don't need to manually deploy load balancing, CDNs, DDoS mitigation, security hardening, and the like. The big pitch is that you're paying a bit more in order to phase out your IT team.

> The big pitch is that you're paying a bit more in order to phase out your IT team. Really? I have to say I don't understand it. I remember the "NoOps" movement from a few years ago and I just find the whole concept around it to be almost hilarious; kind of like Salesforce's old "No Software" logo (which is nowhere to be found in their newer marketing). As I see it, as long as your organization has people using IT i…

My interpretation of devops/noops is that it marks the lack of major distinction in hiring because both ops and development are seen as part of the same process, as opposed to simply pretending you don’t have infrastructure.

This is certainly part of the reasoning for things like terraform, cloudformation, even chef/puppet/ansible—people want a single process for development of reviewing and executing code.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#68

Post by BraveNewCurency »

cmurf wrote: post #8

Is it generally reliable asking Amazon support what capacity you need for a particular use case, so you're not buying more than needed? e.g. a service that might be used once per day for a minute, and another day it might get used a dozen times for maybe an hour, and only during fixed business hours. And there are general purpose, compute optimized, storage optimized, etc. But what if the service is more network late…

> Is it generally reliable asking Amazon support what capacity you need for a particular use case

Everyone's use case is different, they are not experts at your application, you are.

Spend some time learning about the various services, do a deep-dive and maybe even a prototype on the ones that look interesting. There are literally dozens of ways to build any application, depending on what your goals are (low cost, low latency, low maintenance, etc)

> run it for a week

Run it for an hour, you should be able to quickly get a cost/benefit.

There are a ton of instance types, but you generally only need to test 2 or 3 families, and 2-3 sizes. (Do you need lots of RAM? CPU? Disk? FPGAs? GPUs?). It's worth the time to automate this, so you can periodically test it. (Yes, it will cost you a dollar or two.)

> But what if the service is more network latency sensitive

Don't forget your own part of the stack here. Writing in a scripting language can add miliseconds, as can normalizing your data (i.e. NoSQL usually prefers de-normalizing, which trades off more duplication for lower latency).

You can also pay (extra) for no hypervisor.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#69

Post by TomMarius »

amarka wrote: post #16
TomMarius wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I lose more coins out of my pocket on the street yearly

If you're loosing $20 worth of coins out of your pocket somewhere on the street on a yearly basis you're either dealing with a hell of a lot more coins than the average person or you're one clumsy individual.

Nah, just my country uses a lot more of cash. Most common coins are worth $1 and $2.

Re: The Free Stack – Running Your Application for Free on AWS

#70

Post by owenversteeg »

Tade0 wrote: post #41
Scoundreller wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. US coins larger than 25c are uncommon. But other countries have $1 and $2 coins, with paper bills only starting at $5. Transit tokens in Toronto are tiny and worth $3. I’ve dropped a few because they catch on my phone case edge.

Recently I thought I've lost a €5 banknote because some toll machines in Italy send cash[0] flying as if they were doing it with contempt. I found it eventually along a €2 coin somebody left there. On my way back I also found a €1 coin and a 50c one. I guess people lose a measurable amount of cash this way. [0] Non-Italian cards don't work on Italian motorways - only cash. Knowledge I acquired through error of my own…

Huh. How'd that work then? Did they just fine you or send you a bill later?
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