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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

#91

Post by Tade0 »

owenversteeg wrote: post #70
Tade0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Once they notice that someone's clogging the toll booth you receive a receipt with payment details and you have 14 days to do that after which interest starts accumulating.

In one instance in Venice though the employee preferred to argue with me over the speakerphone insisting that I "insert euro" even though I didn't have any cash one me(there are no ATMs on the motorways - something I learned that day).

His line of thinking was that I want the receipt so that I can avoid paying by never returning to Italy.

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

#93

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> Of course, the biggest issue with using free tiers for your entire stack is that you have no guarantee that the services will be running forever.

That's not guaranteed for paid tiers either; no product offering, free or paid, is guaranteed to be offered forever.

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

#94

Post by ksec »

evv wrote: post #25
anothergoogler wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a basic DO droplet, you can still do that for $5/month, and hey, if it takes off your app won't depend on a bunch of expensive proprietary software. Also I'm guessing that if cost is a concern, denial of service is preferable to blowing the bank under unanticipated high loads. Maybe I need to drink more AWS/GCP kool-aid though and see the light.

Recently I've been fascinated at gap between server providers these days. It seems each provider is either: - Enterprise public cloud, AWS/GCP/Azure, expensive but scalable and enterprise friendly - Developer public cloud, Linode/DO, cheap and easy to use Although I say that AWS/GCP/etc are expensive, they obviously have negotiable prices for large customers. I doubt the smaller providers do that. But it makes me won…

The Amazon Lightsail proves there is a huge market for DO and Linode. And DO / Linode aren't exactly cheap, there are lots of players in VPS market that are half the price or more.

I think what is missing is a middle ground approach that scale both ways. Or a Heroku that is built on top of DO / Linode.

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

#95

Post by warrenm »

evv wrote: post #25
anothergoogler wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a basic DO droplet, you can still do that for $5/month, and hey, if it takes off your app won't depend on a bunch of expensive proprietary software. Also I'm guessing that if cost is a concern, denial of service is preferable to blowing the bank under unanticipated high loads. Maybe I need to drink more AWS/GCP kool-aid though and see the light.

Recently I've been fascinated at gap between server providers these days. It seems each provider is either: - Enterprise public cloud, AWS/GCP/Azure, expensive but scalable and enterprise friendly - Developer public cloud, Linode/DO, cheap and easy to use Although I say that AWS/GCP/etc are expensive, they obviously have negotiable prices for large customers. I doubt the smaller providers do that. But it makes me won…

fwiw ... DO, Vultr, and Hetzner have never kicked me off - regardless of how heavily I hit the systems

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

#96

Post by warrenm »

swebs wrote: post #31
evv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I've been fascinated at gap between server providers these days. It seems each provider is either: - Enterprise public cloud, AWS/GCP/Azure, expensive but scalable and enterprise friendly - Developer public cloud, Linode/DO, cheap and easy to use Although I say that AWS/GCP/etc are expensive, they obviously have negotiable prices for large customers. I doubt the smaller providers do that. But it makes me won…

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.

>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.

Might want to go recheck the API documentation for providers like DO et al

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

#97

Post by warrenm »

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…

>the "NoOps" movement

I always pronounced that as "nnnn..oops"

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

#98

Post by warrenm »

scarface74 wrote: post #56
falcor84 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As I see it, as long as your organization has people using IT in any capacity at all, you will need someone in charge of IT Operations. Whatever you may want to call it: DevOps, or SRE, or PE, or even if you just decide it's something that each of your regular devs is going to be doing, it's a function that needs to be done. That's true, but I don't need to worry about the server that my database, load balancer, queu…

>There is an entire level of both hardware and operating system maintenance that I don't have to worry about.

Right. So you traded [relatively] inexpensive OS and infrastructure maintainers for [relatively] expensive application and tier maintainers.

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

#99

Post by warrenm »

rpeden wrote: post #53
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.

With DO and Linode adding things like block storage volumes, object storage, and load balancing, they're becoming more than just simple VPS providers. They definitely don't offer anywhere near as many services as Google, MS, Amazon, or even Alibaba's cloud offerings. But they're becoming pretty decent 'cloud lite' providers who cover what's needed for plenty of folks and companies.

And - at least DO - they've been offering these things for quite a while now, too

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

#100

Post by Willamin »

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?

For most businesses, probably not. I have a few friends that have Etsy shops as hobbies. They don't consistently make enough money from it to justify paying for a Shopify, etc site. So I figured I'd see if I could manage to get the costs down to only a credit card transaction fee.
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