7 ms·

AWS isn’t and has never been economical for side projects or hobby tinkering, unless you specifically want to tinker with AWS. I’m a big AWS fan. I’d recommend

AWS isn’t and has never been economical for side projects or hobby tinkering, unless you specifically want to tinker with AWS. I’m a big AWS fan. I’d recommend any company of decent size to use AWS. But seriously, if your project is just a personal blog or some rails app you tinker with on the weekend, just get a $5/mo instance on Digital Ocean or a raspberry pi.

CoughlinJ 2y ago
Are we entirely discounting the free tier that's provided?
- xyzzy123 2y ago
  My understanding is that free tier is awesome but if you have (for example) a massive traffic spike there's no real way to avoid paying for all the egress unless you go cap in hand to AWS support (who, to be fair, are usually pretty reasonable). There are some mitigating things you can do, set limits on various resources and billing / budgeting alerts but fundamentally I don't think there's an easy way to avoid being on the hook for unexpected costs. Theoretically you could have lambdas that react to billing alerts and shut things down but I've never seen anyone set that up.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Seeing as the free tier only lasts for a year, it seems fair to discount it. If it was free in perpetuity (below some use threshold) that'd be one thing, but it isn't.
  - kassner 2y ago
    There are some resources that have an always-free tier, like DynamoDB, SNS, Lambdas, etc. Check out https://aws.amazon.com/free/ https://aws.amazon.com/free/ You’ll still need a Credit Card on file for overages.
kassner 2y ago
People don’t pick a stack for their personal projects solely because it’s the most rational for their use case, but also to gather experience in said stack, so they can stay up-to-date or gather the experience to work in places that using that stack would make sense. It is similar with resume-driven architectures: let’s build an architecture of the place I want to work, instead of the one for where I do work.
- bigfatkitten 2y ago
  I've long given up on the idea of growing or developing my skills at work[0], and so hobby projects are my only real opportunity to stay current. [0] I won't go into detail here, but it mostly boils down to me working in a specialisation where what skills employers think they need is usually very different to what they actually utilise. If I get laid off tomorrow, I still need to pass an interview somewhere else.
theshrike79 2y ago
My hobby project has been running using the free tier of AWS Lambda and DynamoDB for well over half a decade now. I kinda want to move it to a self-hosted solution, but it's been working fine so far so why bother. Might need to log in and see if I need to update something someday.

CoughlinJ 2y ago

Are we entirely discounting the free tier that's provided?

xyzzy123 2y ago
My understanding is that free tier is awesome but if you have (for example) a massive traffic spike there's no real way to avoid paying for all the egress unless you go cap in hand to AWS support (who, to be fair, are usually pretty reasonable). There are some mitigating things you can do, set limits on various resources and billing / budgeting alerts but fundamentally I don't think there's an easy way to avoid being on the hook for unexpected costs. Theoretically you could have lambdas that react to billing alerts and shut things down but I've never seen anyone set that up.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
Seeing as the free tier only lasts for a year, it seems fair to discount it. If it was free in perpetuity (below some use threshold) that'd be one thing, but it isn't.
- kassner 2y ago
  There are some resources that have an always-free tier, like DynamoDB, SNS, Lambdas, etc. Check out https://aws.amazon.com/free/ https://aws.amazon.com/free/ You’ll still need a Credit Card on file for overages.

kassner 2y ago

People don’t pick a stack for their personal projects solely because it’s the most rational for their use case, but also to gather experience in said stack, so they can stay up-to-date or gather the experience to work in places that using that stack would make sense. It is similar with resume-driven architectures: let’s build an architecture of the place I want to work, instead of the one for where I do work.

bigfatkitten 2y ago
I've long given up on the idea of growing or developing my skills at work[0], and so hobby projects are my only real opportunity to stay current. [0] I won't go into detail here, but it mostly boils down to me working in a specialisation where what skills employers think they need is usually very different to what they actually utilise. If I get laid off tomorrow, I still need to pass an interview somewhere else.

theshrike79 2y ago

My hobby project has been running using the free tier of AWS Lambda and DynamoDB for well over half a decade now. I kinda want to move it to a self-hosted solution, but it's been working fine so far so why bother. Might need to log in and see if I need to update something someday.