5 ms·

To be clear, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has offered "always" free tiers on a lot of their services for a long time now. I assume there must be diffs here, or

To be clear, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has offered "always" free tiers on a lot of their services for a long time now. I assume there must be diffs here, or else this is just a PR move to remind devs that GCP has free tiers. I do want to express my gratitude to GCP for their free tiers. It has enabled me to offer a various online tools to help some of my teacher friends. It makes it easy to just throw together an app like I normally do, but not incur the costs for these lightweight situations. The alternative is to spend my time finding ways to run and manage the stuff for free using local servers or something, which is usually more pain than the simple tools are worth. The free tiers are also one of the reasons I tend to throw all my hobby projects at GCP instead of AWS. GCP services also tend to be easier to use than the equivalent AWS services. Mostly because GCP has a lot less to customize. That's both good and bad, but for hobby projects it comes out net-good. AppEngine is also amazing, if your workload can fit within its limitations. Again, for me it's about reducing hassle so I can focus on tinkering with ideas and projects, which is what AppEngine lets me do. All that good stuff said, I would _never_ recommend GCP for big projects, companies, etc. The platform is rife with instabilities, bugs, backwards incompatible changes, etc. This is from personal experience running a service at a small company, and from my friend's experience running a huge service at a large company. EDIT: I should mention one of my biggest pain points for the way I currently use GCP (as a way to quickly prototype ideas and projects). Databases. There's no free tier on Cloud SQL. Without a free tier it's something like $10-$20/month to run a managed SQL server. So I end up doing everything with Datastore, which is their NoSQL offering. What a huge pain to munge all my data patterns to fit within the limitations of NoSQL. I really wish there was a similarly pay-as-you-go alternative but with real relational queries. Or, you know, a free tier on Cloud SQL... :)

StevePerkins 10y ago
Have they always given away a free GCE VM instance, though? This pretty much eliminates the motivation for having a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet for personal tinkering (which in turn feeds Google more business if your personal tinkering turns serious, or if you favor Google for professional work later because that what you've grown used to). There are a lot of other things on that page for which I've likewise never heard of a free tier. But the raw VM instance one is what jumped off the page at me.
- ac29 10y ago
  > This pretty much eliminates the motivation for having a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet for personal tinkering DO gives you 1TB of transfer for your $5, Google gives you 1GB for $0 and 12c/GB after that. Depending on how much egress traffic your VM generates, the Google "free" tier could be very, very expensive.
zedpm 10y ago
I'd just install Postgres or MySQL or whatever locally on my free instance. It comes with 30GB of disk, which should be plenty if you're just playing/prototyping. Alternately, for the first year you also get $300 credit which could cover Cloud SQL if you really need that.
sjellis 10y ago
EDIT: I should mention one of my biggest pain points for the way I currently use GCP (as a way to quickly prototype ideas and projects). Databases. There's no free tier on Cloud SQL. This was my first thought. I'm currently trying to encourage our developers to start thinking cloud-first, and hosted SQL is integral for a lot. The absence of some tiny hosted SQL means that you can't build learning projects on GCP free tier in the same design that you'd use for commercial projects.

StevePerkins 10y ago

Have they always given away a free GCE VM instance, though? This pretty much eliminates the motivation for having a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet for personal tinkering (which in turn feeds Google more business if your personal tinkering turns serious, or if you favor Google for professional work later because that what you've grown used to). There are a lot of other things on that page for which I've likewise never heard of a free tier. But the raw VM instance one is what jumped off the page at me.

ac29 10y ago
> This pretty much eliminates the motivation for having a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet for personal tinkering DO gives you 1TB of transfer for your $5, Google gives you 1GB for $0 and 12c/GB after that. Depending on how much egress traffic your VM generates, the Google "free" tier could be very, very expensive.

zedpm 10y ago

I'd just install Postgres or MySQL or whatever locally on my free instance. It comes with 30GB of disk, which should be plenty if you're just playing/prototyping. Alternately, for the first year you also get $300 credit which could cover Cloud SQL if you really need that.

sjellis 10y ago

EDIT: I should mention one of my biggest pain points for the way I currently use GCP (as a way to quickly prototype ideas and projects). Databases. There's no free tier on Cloud SQL. This was my first thought. I'm currently trying to encourage our developers to start thinking cloud-first, and hosted SQL is integral for a lot. The absence of some tiny hosted SQL means that you can't build learning projects on GCP free tier in the same design that you'd use for commercial projects.