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Does anyone know of a decent tutorial for building low-volume / prototype interactive web applications using one of the major cloud-hosting providers, wholly wi

Does anyone know of a decent tutorial for building low-volume / prototype interactive web applications using one of the major cloud-hosting providers, wholly within the free limits? Any framework would be interesting for learning purposes. I have some older MVC .NET sites and I poked around with Azure free Windows Server VMs, but the performance is so painfully bad; if you do anything, you run out of memory. But I'm gaining proficiency in NodeJS and Python, and hoping to learn how to take advantage of free tiers for practice in development and testing. I imagine it can all be self-taught/learned, but if there exists documentation to go through the motions in the learning process, I think it would help a lot of people.

dchess 6y ago
Have you tried Heroku? Deploying via git is pretty handy. I've mostly moved to using Dokku on the $5 tier of DigitalOcean, but the approach is simple.
- neogodless 6y ago
  I haven't. That looks super promising! I find AWS/Azure almost intentionally obtuse in their pricing and setup/configuration. This looks like they focus on the opposite!
  - jholman 6y ago
    In the context of AWS Free Tier, the non-obtuse option is you do the EC2 t3.micro with Linux on it, maybe also the RDS t3.micro, and you ignore all that make-things-harder-so-consultants-can-charge-more nonsense. Install your own nginx, install your own node or python or whatever, ignore all their obtuse crap. Heroku is cool, too, though.
    - timClicks 6y ago
      There's no "always free" AWS tier though, correct? You're still going to end up paying for the app after 12 months, or am I missing something?
      - jholman 6y ago
        That's also my understanding. Heroku, on the other hand, has no time-limit on their free tier, but it's always kinda broken (startup times). AWS's free tier is the real deal. That's a trade-off. But that's orthogonal to the point I was making, and the comment I was replying to. If someone likes Heroku because of it's pricing clarity and its ease of setup... well, the pricing simplicity of an EC2 instance is just as good, and the ease of setup is even better. More broadly, if you're evaluating them against each other.... Heroku isn't the easiest to set up, nor is it the simplest. It's not the easiest because you have to learn a bunch of Heroku-specific things, that you'll just have to reinvent/relearn/etc if you ever want to switch providers. To call it "vendor lock-in" might be a bit of a stretch, but it has aspects of that. With EC2, it's just server management, same as it ever was, same as it'd be on some other cloud. (Note that many OTHER AWS services are far worse than Heroku in this respect. And/or better, depending on your goals.) Heroku aims to be a sweet spot. A few hours (or days, maybe) invested in learning to use it properly, and you get a pretty reasonable bundle of tools and support and so on. But if you want to dive deep, Heroku's probably a waste of time. And and the other extreme, if you don't want to learn anything about an individual provider's proprietary crap, then Heroku also will not work out that well for you. Saying "this is our sweet spot" is a respectable position, even if you don't like the sweet spot. (Personally, I'm still boycotting Heroku over their years of misrepresenting their "dynamic mesh routing", which was always fiction and which they lied about for years, and charged customers for something that they knew full well they weren't delivering. Don't get into bed with sociopaths, even if you like their sweet spot.)
        ehershey 6y ago
        > Heroku-specific things, that you'll just have to reinvent/relearn/etc if you ever want to switch providers. To call it "vendor lock-in" might be a bit of a stretch It’s an understatement, not a stretch. Heroku has always seemed really interesting/cool/clever to me. The tradeoff has never been worth the investment when I’ve considered using them, personally or professionally. Their operating model is far too different than every other cloud provider’s.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    Curious to know more about what specifically you find obtuse about pricing? I've used Azure a lot, and don't recall any ambiguous pricing.
    - neogodless 6y ago
      While I was doing the "free 30 days + 12 months of free stuff", a certain level of MSSQL was listed as free, but hidden under that is creating the storage for MSSQL which is a separate and additional cost that you cannot avoid. (At least, not that I could figure out.) By the end of my 30 days, I found the bare minimum performing low volume .NET + SQL on Azure was going to be $30+/month even for just a prototype/development site, and I can pay less elsewhere for higher performance (though perhaps less control). And when I say "performing", I just mean the VM not being too slow to actually use as a UI, and throwing low memory errors constantly. The free tiers for Windows Server are, in my opinion, unusable at all.
      - GordonS 6y ago
        You do get some free storage with the free tier database, but it is only a paltry 32MB. Additional storage is only $0.221/GB/m though. The paid cheapest SQL database (B0) is only $5/m, which comes with 2GB of storage. In practise, this is absolutely fine for light usage. By .NET + SQL, I assume you mean you were using an App Service? They come with a lot of convenience, but I definitely agree that they are too expensive, especially when considering the level of compute you get. I raised this with someone from Microsoft before, and they said they were confident the value offered was worth it. There is a free tier for App Service though. It's a shared compute model - I tried it a while back, and the performance was totally fine for light usage. I wouldn't try to run Windows Server on a B1S, as they only have 1GB of RAM :) You might just about get away with it for Server Nano, but I've never actually used it. Best stick with Linux or BSD for these tiny VMs.
      - redstripe 6y ago
        I run a hobby .net core website on a $5 digital ocean instance and it runs fast as hell. You definitively don't need to spend $30. I'm using a PG database but it looks like maybe it would even be possible to run SQL server on a 2GB instance. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-setup?view=sql-server-ver15 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-... You just have to bite the bullet and learn a few linux admin tasks like setting up nginx, supervisor, file permissions. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy/linux-nginx?view=aspnetcore-5.0 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy...
  - abiogenesis 6y ago
    Amazon has another offering called Lightsail [1] with simpler pricing. It might work better for side projects. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
cosmodisk 6y ago
What about ASP.NET + Azure? I'm still having wet dreams after using it on a pet project last year. Azure even has like one click deployment for it- super easy. Alternatively, Heroku is supposed to cater for this,or Elastic Beanstalk if you want to go AWS route.
- neogodless 6y ago
  I tried the Azure try out for 30 days. Unfortunately I missed the one-click deployment stuff. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place? But I mean, that's the thing. I created the account and was looking at the UI - but didn't find that. So maybe I'm terrible at reading web pages, or maybe the UI isn't designed to get me where I need to go.
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    I believe I was using this one st the time: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/deployment/quickstart-deploy-to-azure?view=vs-2019 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/deployment/qui...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nine_k 6y ago
I suspect that pretty normal development using Python, Node, or Go would fit free tiers of various AWS services, provided they are not serving a lot of requests.
tylerrobinson 6y ago
Another vote for Heroku. If you can get it running locally, you can get it running on Heroku. Their help docs are mostly helpful (not perfect), and if you’ve been able to get this far then you’ll have an easy time with it. The free tier has forced downtime, but I think the lowest non-free tier is only like $7/month. Edit: also, if you find that you need other cloud offerings from AWS or Azure, you can combine it pretty easily. I did image upload to S3, for example, from a Heroku app.
gabrielrdz 6y ago
If you search for Scott Hanselman's Penny Pinching blog post series, he details how he runs a couple of his high volume sites for as cheap as possible in Azure.
Sxubas 6y ago
I've used firebase and I would say is perfect for what you describe. No idea how it would work for a bigger project though

dchess 6y ago

Have you tried Heroku? Deploying via git is pretty handy. I've mostly moved to using Dokku on the $5 tier of DigitalOcean, but the approach is simple.

neogodless 6y ago
I haven't. That looks super promising! I find AWS/Azure almost intentionally obtuse in their pricing and setup/configuration. This looks like they focus on the opposite!
- jholman 6y ago
  In the context of AWS Free Tier, the non-obtuse option is you do the EC2 t3.micro with Linux on it, maybe also the RDS t3.micro, and you ignore all that make-things-harder-so-consultants-can-charge-more nonsense. Install your own nginx, install your own node or python or whatever, ignore all their obtuse crap. Heroku is cool, too, though.
  - timClicks 6y ago
    There's no "always free" AWS tier though, correct? You're still going to end up paying for the app after 12 months, or am I missing something?
    - jholman 6y ago
      That's also my understanding. Heroku, on the other hand, has no time-limit on their free tier, but it's always kinda broken (startup times). AWS's free tier is the real deal. That's a trade-off. But that's orthogonal to the point I was making, and the comment I was replying to. If someone likes Heroku because of it's pricing clarity and its ease of setup... well, the pricing simplicity of an EC2 instance is just as good, and the ease of setup is even better. More broadly, if you're evaluating them against each other.... Heroku isn't the easiest to set up, nor is it the simplest. It's not the easiest because you have to learn a bunch of Heroku-specific things, that you'll just have to reinvent/relearn/etc if you ever want to switch providers. To call it "vendor lock-in" might be a bit of a stretch, but it has aspects of that. With EC2, it's just server management, same as it ever was, same as it'd be on some other cloud. (Note that many OTHER AWS services are far worse than Heroku in this respect. And/or better, depending on your goals.) Heroku aims to be a sweet spot. A few hours (or days, maybe) invested in learning to use it properly, and you get a pretty reasonable bundle of tools and support and so on. But if you want to dive deep, Heroku's probably a waste of time. And and the other extreme, if you don't want to learn anything about an individual provider's proprietary crap, then Heroku also will not work out that well for you. Saying "this is our sweet spot" is a respectable position, even if you don't like the sweet spot. (Personally, I'm still boycotting Heroku over their years of misrepresenting their "dynamic mesh routing", which was always fiction and which they lied about for years, and charged customers for something that they knew full well they weren't delivering. Don't get into bed with sociopaths, even if you like their sweet spot.)
      - ehershey 6y ago
        > Heroku-specific things, that you'll just have to reinvent/relearn/etc if you ever want to switch providers. To call it "vendor lock-in" might be a bit of a stretch It’s an understatement, not a stretch. Heroku has always seemed really interesting/cool/clever to me. The tradeoff has never been worth the investment when I’ve considered using them, personally or professionally. Their operating model is far too different than every other cloud provider’s.
- GordonS 6y ago
  Curious to know more about what specifically you find obtuse about pricing? I've used Azure a lot, and don't recall any ambiguous pricing.
  - neogodless 6y ago
    While I was doing the "free 30 days + 12 months of free stuff", a certain level of MSSQL was listed as free, but hidden under that is creating the storage for MSSQL which is a separate and additional cost that you cannot avoid. (At least, not that I could figure out.) By the end of my 30 days, I found the bare minimum performing low volume .NET + SQL on Azure was going to be $30+/month even for just a prototype/development site, and I can pay less elsewhere for higher performance (though perhaps less control). And when I say "performing", I just mean the VM not being too slow to actually use as a UI, and throwing low memory errors constantly. The free tiers for Windows Server are, in my opinion, unusable at all.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      You do get some free storage with the free tier database, but it is only a paltry 32MB. Additional storage is only $0.221/GB/m though. The paid cheapest SQL database (B0) is only $5/m, which comes with 2GB of storage. In practise, this is absolutely fine for light usage. By .NET + SQL, I assume you mean you were using an App Service? They come with a lot of convenience, but I definitely agree that they are too expensive, especially when considering the level of compute you get. I raised this with someone from Microsoft before, and they said they were confident the value offered was worth it. There is a free tier for App Service though. It's a shared compute model - I tried it a while back, and the performance was totally fine for light usage. I wouldn't try to run Windows Server on a B1S, as they only have 1GB of RAM :) You might just about get away with it for Server Nano, but I've never actually used it. Best stick with Linux or BSD for these tiny VMs.
    - redstripe 6y ago
      I run a hobby .net core website on a $5 digital ocean instance and it runs fast as hell. You definitively don't need to spend $30. I'm using a PG database but it looks like maybe it would even be possible to run SQL server on a 2GB instance. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-setup?view=sql-server-ver15 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-... You just have to bite the bullet and learn a few linux admin tasks like setting up nginx, supervisor, file permissions. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy/linux-nginx?view=aspnetcore-5.0 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy...
- abiogenesis 6y ago
  Amazon has another offering called Lightsail [1] with simpler pricing. It might work better for side projects. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/

cosmodisk 6y ago

What about ASP.NET + Azure? I'm still having wet dreams after using it on a pet project last year. Azure even has like one click deployment for it- super easy. Alternatively, Heroku is supposed to cater for this,or Elastic Beanstalk if you want to go AWS route.

neogodless 6y ago
I tried the Azure try out for 30 days. Unfortunately I missed the one-click deployment stuff. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place? But I mean, that's the thing. I created the account and was looking at the UI - but didn't find that. So maybe I'm terrible at reading web pages, or maybe the UI isn't designed to get me where I need to go.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  I believe I was using this one st the time: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/deployment/quickstart-deploy-to-azure?view=vs-2019 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/deployment/qui...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nine_k 6y ago

I suspect that pretty normal development using Python, Node, or Go would fit free tiers of various AWS services, provided they are not serving a lot of requests.

tylerrobinson 6y ago

Another vote for Heroku. If you can get it running locally, you can get it running on Heroku. Their help docs are mostly helpful (not perfect), and if you’ve been able to get this far then you’ll have an easy time with it. The free tier has forced downtime, but I think the lowest non-free tier is only like $7/month. Edit: also, if you find that you need other cloud offerings from AWS or Azure, you can combine it pretty easily. I did image upload to S3, for example, from a Heroku app.

gabrielrdz 6y ago

If you search for Scott Hanselman's Penny Pinching blog post series, he details how he runs a couple of his high volume sites for as cheap as possible in Azure.

Sxubas 6y ago

I've used firebase and I would say is perfect for what you describe. No idea how it would work for a bigger project though