[geekbri]

Maybe I'm the only one but the lack of ability for me to use GCE for a personal server to become familiar with the service is a huge deal.

AWS offers a free tier. This let me play with AWS on my own time gratis. I think GCE needs this... unless they have it and I'm just not aware.

[euank]

Both AWS free and GCE require a credit card before doing anything at all, so that's not a barrier.

As for the actual price... GCE's cost of .013c / hour is so tiny that I don't see how you can say it's a "huge deal".

You can spin up a GCE for 5 hours a day for a week to experiment and it'll cost you less than 50 cents. It's not quite free, but it basically is. As long as you're just playing around, always-on shouldn't matter so you can spin the server up to play, down when you're done, and thus pay almost nothing.

[TheMagicHorsey]

I built stuff on Google App Engine for free, for years.

[geekbri]

I'm not as concerned with the app engine as I am with the compute engine.

app engine is more like AWS beanstalk where as compute engine is more like ec2?

Maybe I'm wrong here.