I've been using a $35 rpi4 for years, it's been a significantly better experience and cost ($0 after initial purchase) than any abstracted PaaS/IaaS I ever trie

I've been using a $35 rpi4 for years, it's been a significantly better experience and cost ($0 after initial purchase) than any abstracted PaaS/IaaS I ever tried, and performance is significantly better than the free or hobby tiers. With no need for regional deploys or to have devs contributing from all over, there's not a huge need for cloud. Also kinda nice knowing all my customer data and other PI is at my house instead of at Google's or Amazon's house. Remember when Twitter and GitHub were storing passwords in plain text for years? So yeah... the peace of mind of knowing a 22 y/o at their first job is not making security decisions with my data and infra! Let alone the fact these companies sell your data including your IP - you agree to it in their terms. Beyond this stuff, I always found the UX of IaaS like AWS/GCP/etc. to be a nightmare, particularly the IAM experience. Not just navigating their awful dashboard pages, but learning their brand-specific jargon, managing service accounts, staying up-to-date on latest marketing and service breakdowns for every little thing - it quickly takes over your attention (and budget). Not to mention, using IaaS feels like devolving from a modern developer to an early 00s IT specialist. AWS feels less like "infrastructure" and more like a modern take on cPanel but with far less visibility/control over the server. I digress... in 2021 I copy/pasted my "mono-server" setup from Heroku over to the Pi 4 with vanilla Raspbian and it's been running 24/7/365 ever since. It powers 15+ APIs/backends including a booking engine for a local business in SF, some real-time socket servers for games, and there's both a SQL (postgres) and NoSQL (mongo) server running too. I attached a touch screen that shows the console output in fullscreen, and I velcro it to my wall. It looks like a smartphone charging on my wall or a smart thermostat or something, but it's nice to be able to walk up and see how things are doing. Feels better than checking any dashboard. I've had to restart it only twice over the years. A couple times it just stopped responding to requests, though didn't appear to be frozen. I could stop it and npm start again but nothing. When this happens, have to fully restart and run IPTABLES stuff again to put it back online. However - that's mere minutes spent each year rather than spending significant time every single day in an IaaS or PaaS. Thanks for sharing this awesome list, I'm due for an upgrade pretty soon and I am so glad to see so many low cost options. My hope is that more developers get into these mini PCs around the world, and I imagine a future where the Big Cloud providers play a much smaller more specific role (government data, public domain computing) rather than being the de facto platform for hobby/startup projects. Even things like regional deployments and distributed/"serverless" computing can be accomplished with networks and proxying without giving it all away to a major cloud provider.