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> This opens up a world of try-out mini applications that cost cents to host Given how much performance you can squeeze out of a $5/month VPS (I've been spinni

> This opens up a world of try-out mini applications that cost cents to host Given how much performance you can squeeze out of a $5/month VPS (I've been spinning them up and indeed down regularly over the last couple of years), is this really a paradigm shift?

anilgulecha 4y ago
Millions of students and enthusiasts around the world would find that cost sufficiently friction-ful to not try out things.
- kortilla 4y ago
  Who absolutely would not want to give a credit card to AWS where a bill is dynamic. If $5/mo is bad they definitely can’t handle the screw up that scales up and runs overnight for $500.
- vidarh 4y ago
  Free tier instances on various providers provides an option. And if you can't afford $5 a month you really shouldn't be playing with services where there's a risk of huge overages if you face a sudden spike in users.
  - avinassh 4y ago
    You cannot sign up on AWS Free Tier without the credit card info and many students end up with a huge bill. This sub reddit.com/r/aws/ has many such posts. Some links and discussions: - https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/please-fix-the-aws-free-tier-before?s=r https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/please-fix-the-aws-fre... - https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044371
    - vidarh 4y ago
      Well, and that is just as much of an issue if you use most serverless offerings. But you're not prepared to carefully manage your use, cloud services should not even be on your radar.
  - ptman 4y ago
    Comparison of free tiers: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/
- logifail 4y ago
  > Millions of students and enthusiasts around the world would find that cost sufficiently friction-ful to not try out things I appreciate there are indeed billions of people for whom $5 is a lot of money, but just how many of them are "students and enthusiasts" itching to get started with Postgres? I realise that - perhaps particularly here - a $5/month VPS is a deeply unsexy thing. You can, however, achieve (and learn) an awful lot with one.
  - Art9681 4y ago
    Nowadays there's a ton of idling compute capacity running client side that could be used to spin up a personal cloud environment with all core services if one has the proper knowledge. For anyone that has a core to spare and a few GB's of memory, which should be easy for most modrn midrange hardware, I would recommend they save that $5 paying for a third party VPS, go deploy an open source hypervisor such as KVM, and run the virtual server on your own hardware.
nikita 4y ago
We don't know. But we built it anyway because it may be that.
sofixa 4y ago
On that $5/month VPS there's management overhead - you need to have at least basic Linux knowledge, and ideally more than that to know not to do stupid things like chmod 777 and database exposed on the public internet. You also need to do your updates, etc. I'm an (former) SRE and run my own Kubernetes cluster for fun, but still use serverless (containers as a service, static website hosting) depending on the project.
- vidarh 4y ago
  With every cloud service there's a management overhead too. Just different skills you need to learn. I've done SRE/devops work in various capacities including consulting longer than cloud services have existed, and my experience is that I've consistently earned more from clients who insisted on cloud services because they consistently need more help. Nothing is driving more demand for devops consulting services than cloud providers.
  - elondaits 4y ago
    The issue with a full Linux system’s overhead is that if there are any new security vulnerabilities the situation could blow up in your face (e.g. the system is used to send spam, or host malware), so you need to maintain it at least minimally. With a serverless cloud architecture at worst it’ll stop working.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      Or you just use Flatcar (a derivative of CoreOS), and don't worry about anything more than rebooting once a new image has been (auto-)installed, and run everything else in app containers where you have to worry about nothing more than what you would in your regular cloud setups. This is not hard to get right. Yes, you need to learn how to do it, but the amount of money I've made from clients who thought cloud was simple and proceeded to create massive security holes for themselves is fairly substantial. People who think they're reducing their attack surface by using these services need to reevaluate - they're large, complex architectures that very few users understand properly. You need to learn the skills either way.

anilgulecha 4y ago

Millions of students and enthusiasts around the world would find that cost sufficiently friction-ful to not try out things.

kortilla 4y ago
Who absolutely would not want to give a credit card to AWS where a bill is dynamic. If $5/mo is bad they definitely can’t handle the screw up that scales up and runs overnight for $500.
vidarh 4y ago
Free tier instances on various providers provides an option. And if you can't afford $5 a month you really shouldn't be playing with services where there's a risk of huge overages if you face a sudden spike in users.
- avinassh 4y ago
  You cannot sign up on AWS Free Tier without the credit card info and many students end up with a huge bill. This sub reddit.com/r/aws/ has many such posts. Some links and discussions: - https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/please-fix-the-aws-free-tier-before?s=r https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/please-fix-the-aws-fre... - https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044371
  - vidarh 4y ago
    Well, and that is just as much of an issue if you use most serverless offerings. But you're not prepared to carefully manage your use, cloud services should not even be on your radar.
- ptman 4y ago
  Comparison of free tiers: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/
logifail 4y ago
> Millions of students and enthusiasts around the world would find that cost sufficiently friction-ful to not try out things I appreciate there are indeed billions of people for whom $5 is a lot of money, but just how many of them are "students and enthusiasts" itching to get started with Postgres? I realise that - perhaps particularly here - a $5/month VPS is a deeply unsexy thing. You can, however, achieve (and learn) an awful lot with one.
- Art9681 4y ago
  Nowadays there's a ton of idling compute capacity running client side that could be used to spin up a personal cloud environment with all core services if one has the proper knowledge. For anyone that has a core to spare and a few GB's of memory, which should be easy for most modrn midrange hardware, I would recommend they save that $5 paying for a third party VPS, go deploy an open source hypervisor such as KVM, and run the virtual server on your own hardware.

nikita 4y ago

We don't know. But we built it anyway because it may be that.

sofixa 4y ago

On that $5/month VPS there's management overhead - you need to have at least basic Linux knowledge, and ideally more than that to know not to do stupid things like chmod 777 and database exposed on the public internet. You also need to do your updates, etc. I'm an (former) SRE and run my own Kubernetes cluster for fun, but still use serverless (containers as a service, static website hosting) depending on the project.

vidarh 4y ago
With every cloud service there's a management overhead too. Just different skills you need to learn. I've done SRE/devops work in various capacities including consulting longer than cloud services have existed, and my experience is that I've consistently earned more from clients who insisted on cloud services because they consistently need more help. Nothing is driving more demand for devops consulting services than cloud providers.
- elondaits 4y ago
  The issue with a full Linux system’s overhead is that if there are any new security vulnerabilities the situation could blow up in your face (e.g. the system is used to send spam, or host malware), so you need to maintain it at least minimally. With a serverless cloud architecture at worst it’ll stop working.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    Or you just use Flatcar (a derivative of CoreOS), and don't worry about anything more than rebooting once a new image has been (auto-)installed, and run everything else in app containers where you have to worry about nothing more than what you would in your regular cloud setups. This is not hard to get right. Yes, you need to learn how to do it, but the amount of money I've made from clients who thought cloud was simple and proceeded to create massive security holes for themselves is fairly substantial. People who think they're reducing their attack surface by using these services need to reevaluate - they're large, complex architectures that very few users understand properly. You need to learn the skills either way.