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How can I experiment with Cloud (Azure, AWS, Google, etc) without going broke?
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Problem
Cloud technologies are very hot right now, but they can be expensive. What are the best strategies for learning/trying cloud services without racking up a huge bill?
Solution
The three major cloud platforms you mentioned have either free trials or a free tier; these all include spending and resource caps which prevent you from spending more than your free trial allows:
Azure
Azure offer £150/$200/€170 for the first one month of usage, in addition many of Azure's services have a free or low cost tier:
If you have a MSDN or Visual Stuido Online account you can also get £100/$150/€130 per month of credit just because you are a subscriber to one of these services.
If you are a startup you may qualify for $120,000 of Azure Credits to host your application through Microsoft's BizSpark programme.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon have a Free Tier which includes:
In addition there perpetually free usage allowances on most services:
Google Compute Platform
Google offer a $300 free trial for 12 months in a similar deal to Amazon. In addition they have free usage tiers for many of their core offerings:
If all of that wasn't enough for you most of the cloud providers will compensate you in credits if you blog about their services in detail, you do have to put in a substantial effort up front and "appear" on their radar by writing blog posts, presenting at meetup and conferences but once they see you they will gladly put $100 a month towards your further learning.
Azure
Azure offer £150/$200/€170 for the first one month of usage, in addition many of Azure's services have a free or low cost tier:
- App Service Free Tier
- SQL Azure Basic Instance @ £0.005/hour
- Azure Machine Learning Free Tier
- Azure Service Bus @ £0.04/million operations
- Azure Functions @ £0.15 per million executions
If you have a MSDN or Visual Stuido Online account you can also get £100/$150/€130 per month of credit just because you are a subscriber to one of these services.
If you are a startup you may qualify for $120,000 of Azure Credits to host your application through Microsoft's BizSpark programme.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon have a Free Tier which includes:
- 750 Hours of EC2 which equates to about a month of a t2.micro instance
- 750 Amazon RDS
- 5GB S3
- 250,000 AWS IoT Messages
- ... and more
In addition there perpetually free usage allowances on most services:
- AWS Lambda: 1 million free requests a month
- DynamoDB: 25GB Storage
- Amazon SNS: 1 million publishes
- ... and more
Google Compute Platform
Google offer a $300 free trial for 12 months in a similar deal to Amazon. In addition they have free usage tiers for many of their core offerings:
- Google App Engine: 28 instance hours / day
- Google Cloud Database: 1GB Storage
- Google Compute Engine: 1 f1-micro instance / month
- Google Pub/Sub: 10GB messages / month
- Google Cloud Functions: 10 million executions / month
- ... and more
If all of that wasn't enough for you most of the cloud providers will compensate you in credits if you blog about their services in detail, you do have to put in a substantial effort up front and "appear" on their radar by writing blog posts, presenting at meetup and conferences but once they see you they will gladly put $100 a month towards your further learning.
Context
StackExchange DevOps Q#1002, answer score: 20
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