[pclmulqdq]

The AWS free tier lets you do a lot, and if you use it well, it lets you avoid up to about $50/month of digitalocean bills.

If you're never planning on scaling past a hobby project, the free tier is a great place to stay. If your hobby project "goes viral," though, it might cost you a few thousand dollars, but hopefully that helps you get a lot more money to turn your hobby into a business.

If you have commercial intent, however, $50/month goes from an expensive hobby (3 streaming services) to a very cheap business. At that point, the fact that you don't have to pay for scale on DO VMs and other platforms actually makes a lot more sense. You can sleep at night knowing that you will still have a business even under a load spike, and $50 of digital Ocean buys you roughly the compute power of $1000+ of AWS managed services.

[CharlieDigital]

The beauty of container based serverless is that you have portability. If your hobby project takes off and you want to run it on DO up to a certain ramp, you can still move your container workload into DO.

Google Cloud Run, Azure Container Apps, and AWS AppRunner (less so because it doesn't scale to zero) are really great tools for hobby devs and small shops.

[beardedetim]

> The beauty of container based serverless is that you have portability.

I think this is the major take away I am having from this hype cycle of the Cloud: that if we just build containers/functions, we can sort everything else out however the credit card allows.

I'm on the fence about if it should be DO or EKS or GKE or whatever. That's for Credit Card Man and me to decide. As an engineer, I just want to build a docker container and call it a day.

[ericd]

Yep, we were easily saving a developer salary per month vs AWS using colo’d hardware even as a very small company. And god help you if you’re trying to run something bandwidth intensive on AWS.

[nine_k]

What happens if your server's hardware seriously breaks?

[Nextgrid]

You use the spare that's next to it, failing that, in a desperate situation, go to any computer store, buy the biggest gaming PC you can find, load it up with RAM and use that. It'll work, your customers won't know nor care.

In practice, I wouldn't recommend colocation until you are at the scale and budget where you can maintain your own spares. Better outsource it to a dedicated host like OVH/Hetzner/etc that has tons of servers and can immediately replace the hardware.

[ericd]

Then there are a few other physical servers with load balanced redundant VMs, and it fails over seamlessly. HAProxy makes this pretty easy to handle. But we almost never had any hardware issues, servers are pretty reliable.

[nine_k]

Sounds pretty much like a... cloud? :-D

Actually I think that private cloud-like architecture (a bunch of physical servers with e.g. Dokku running on them) can be a good solution in some circumstances.

[Spivak]

Yes, this isn't as much of a gotcha as you make it seem. On prem is literally running your own cloud. The architecture that all the big cloud providers use of racks and racks of servers running hypervisors deploying VMs using a shared storage tier and SDN is the same thing you build when you're on-prem. You are now just the implementor.

[fullstackchris]

> it lets you avoid up to about $50/month of digitalocean bills.

Wish I'd know about this AWS free tier, because that sounds a lot like my monthly digital ocean bill :')

[nicoburns]

What are you running that costs $50/month? Several services with decent amounts of traffic?

[CharlieDigital]

If you run an RDS instance, I can see hitting that.

But there are alternatives like using Supabase or any of the Postgres or MySQL aligned serverless DBs like Cockroach, Planetscale, or other services if you want relational semantics and still be serverless.

On AWS, the load balancer is also surprisingly pricey; easily eats up $20/mo.

[pclmulqdq]

The pattern that is free on AWS and costs a fair amount on digital ocean is one or two VPS-es (or equivalent serverless/kubernetes compute) plus a managed database instance. If you don't have the managed database, the AWS free tier is a lot less attractive.