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Well, the costs are nicer, but mostly, Glacier goes from an unusable pricing model to a usable one. I was terrified to use Glacier. The previous model, if you m

by cpkpad 10y ago

Well, the costs are nicer, but mostly, Glacier goes from an unusable pricing model to a usable one. I was terrified to use Glacier. The previous model, if you made requests too rapidly, you might be hit with thousands of dollars of bills for relatively small data retrievals -- very easy to make a very expensive bug. I had wanted Amazon to wrap it in something where they managed that complexity for a long time. Looks like they finally did. Now the only thing Amazon needs to do is expand free tiers on all of their services, or at least very low cost ones. I prototype a lot of things from home for work -- kinda 20% time style projects where I couldn't really budget resources for it. The free tier is great for that. All services ought to have it -- especially RDS. I ought to be able to have a slice of a database (even kilobytes/tens of accesses/not-guaranteed security/shared server) paying nothing or pennies.

Johnny555 10y ago
A t2.large costs 10 cents/hour, a t2.medium RDS instance costs 7 cents/hour. If you put in 50 hours/month on this side project, that's $8.50 for compute plus maybe $3 for ~ 30GB of storage. $11.50/month doesn't sound too hard to budget for.
- andrioni 10y ago
  It might be more about bureaucracy than about cost. At my last job even small expenses would require printing forms and getting the CFO to sign them, so in the end it was pretty much not worth it for small tests.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Your work can't give you a few VMs in a lab somewhere that you can get free rein to prototype on? That is usually not too hard to get.. it seems the idea of the Amazon free tier is to give people a taste of AWS so they can decide to go in more or not. It's not really designed to be a free prototype for existing large customers product. Like the other poster said, you can host a tiny VM for $6 or so a month, not a big expense. If you are asking for $4000 a month production cluster, yes that is harder to just get..
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
Same about prototypes! I wonder how many other people have created really great products for their company doing the same thing. It would be in any company's best interest to provide free tiers for experimentation.
emmjay 10y ago
RDS does have a free tier: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/free/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/free/
- codezero 10y ago
  While cool, this is only valid for the first 12 months of an AWS account.
  - dawnerd 10y ago
    I've seen people suggest this a lot when someone is asking for hosting advice. Do people just make new accounts every year or something?
    - Monotoko 10y ago
      Yes, that's what I do and it's pretty much encouraged when I asked AWS if it was allowed.
    - codezero 10y ago
      I dunno, I've never done that, too much of a pain :/
    - fapjacks 10y ago
      I've been doing that every year since 2007! You can even use the same credit card information.
Lazare 10y ago
Agreed. Glacier was, from my point of view, literally unusable. Now, it's usable. I still may not use it but at least I can.
hawkice 10y ago
I run dozens of small side projects off a $10/mo DigitalOcean server. I do not mind paying that absurdly low amount.
010a 10y ago
Dynamo might fill this need for you; you can provision a 1/1 table for less than a dollar per month and just put everything in it. Dynamo will bank some provisioned throughput for you to allow bursting, and the client apis all implement exponential backoff in the event of a throttle, so a 1/1 table isn't nearly as scary as you might initially think. Of course, then you're using Dynamo.
- reducesuffering 10y ago
  Is there a common perception of DynamoDB? Or are you just referring to the old Dynamo?
Twirrim 10y ago
> The previous model, if you made requests too rapidly, you might be hit with thousands of dollars of bills for relatively small data retrievals -- very easy to make a very expensive bug. Glacier has supported for something like 18 months now, the ability to put a policy on your vault that capped your maximum retrieval cost. Whenever your request would cause you to exceed that limit, it would get throttle response that the SDK handles happily. I've used it when I needed to retrieve a whole bunch of data and wanted to do it faster than the free tier supported. I set it at $5 and just left the retrieval running.

by cpkpad 10y ago

Johnny555 10y ago

A t2.large costs 10 cents/hour, a t2.medium RDS instance costs 7 cents/hour. If you put in 50 hours/month on this side project, that's $8.50 for compute plus maybe $3 for ~ 30GB of storage. $11.50/month doesn't sound too hard to budget for.

andrioni 10y ago
It might be more about bureaucracy than about cost. At my last job even small expenses would require printing forms and getting the CFO to sign them, so in the end it was pretty much not worth it for small tests.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Your work can't give you a few VMs in a lab somewhere that you can get free rein to prototype on? That is usually not too hard to get.. it seems the idea of the Amazon free tier is to give people a taste of AWS so they can decide to go in more or not. It's not really designed to be a free prototype for existing large customers product. Like the other poster said, you can host a tiny VM for $6 or so a month, not a big expense. If you are asking for $4000 a month production cluster, yes that is harder to just get..

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

Same about prototypes! I wonder how many other people have created really great products for their company doing the same thing. It would be in any company's best interest to provide free tiers for experimentation.

emmjay 10y ago

RDS does have a free tier: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/free/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/free/

codezero 10y ago
While cool, this is only valid for the first 12 months of an AWS account.
- dawnerd 10y ago
  I've seen people suggest this a lot when someone is asking for hosting advice. Do people just make new accounts every year or something?
  - Monotoko 10y ago
    Yes, that's what I do and it's pretty much encouraged when I asked AWS if it was allowed.
  - codezero 10y ago
    I dunno, I've never done that, too much of a pain :/
  - fapjacks 10y ago
    I've been doing that every year since 2007! You can even use the same credit card information.

Lazare 10y ago

Agreed. Glacier was, from my point of view, literally unusable. Now, it's usable. I still may not use it but at least I can.

hawkice 10y ago

I run dozens of small side projects off a $10/mo DigitalOcean server. I do not mind paying that absurdly low amount.

010a 10y ago

Dynamo might fill this need for you; you can provision a 1/1 table for less than a dollar per month and just put everything in it. Dynamo will bank some provisioned throughput for you to allow bursting, and the client apis all implement exponential backoff in the event of a throttle, so a 1/1 table isn't nearly as scary as you might initially think. Of course, then you're using Dynamo.

reducesuffering 10y ago
Is there a common perception of DynamoDB? Or are you just referring to the old Dynamo?

Twirrim 10y ago

> The previous model, if you made requests too rapidly, you might be hit with thousands of dollars of bills for relatively small data retrievals -- very easy to make a very expensive bug. Glacier has supported for something like 18 months now, the ability to put a policy on your vault that capped your maximum retrieval cost. Whenever your request would cause you to exceed that limit, it would get throttle response that the SDK handles happily. I've used it when I needed to retrieve a whole bunch of data and wanted to do it faster than the free tier supported. I set it at $5 and just left the retrieval running.