Jan-25-2021, 05:05 PM
I've been working with AWS for the past several months for work, and I've got to be honest, it's much better than I ever thought possible.
Previously, I had a little space on a shared server where I'd throw things. Maybe I'm dumb, but I assumed the big cloud providers (azure, gcp, aws, etc) were basically just a way for you to offload your datacenter so you didn't need to maintain servers yourself. Just like my little shared account, but with more power.
But there's so many other features that are useful to pretty much all devs. AWS, for example, has a 'free tier' which is very generous. Some things are free for 12 months, some are free forever (for light usage). They do this, so people like me will try them out, play around, and see what they can do, without having to pay anything. Then we're more likely to incorporate those things into production workloads that might end up costing money eventually.
AWS Lambda is one of my favorite things right now. You upload code (python 2.x and 3.x are fully supported), including a zip file with any libraries you import, and then aws spins up a virtual server just to run your code, and kills the server after a few minutes of inactivity. The tooling around it is incredible. Zappa (https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa) for example, packages up Flask apps, reads your requirements.txt file for dependencies, zips those dependencies up for you, deploys to Lambda, sets up AWS Gateway routes, CloudWatch/XRay logging, etc. Which means you can very easily, without making any code changes at all, have a full flask app running in aws, for free, forever (Lambda's free tier is permanent, not 12 months). And the free tier for lambda is extremely generous (I have 3 apps, one using websocket connections, and the other two scheduled to run every few minutes, and my bill is $0).
It's so much cooler than I thought it could be, which makes me wonder what else I've been missing out on. What's some cool tech you've seen lately or played around with?
Previously, I had a little space on a shared server where I'd throw things. Maybe I'm dumb, but I assumed the big cloud providers (azure, gcp, aws, etc) were basically just a way for you to offload your datacenter so you didn't need to maintain servers yourself. Just like my little shared account, but with more power.
But there's so many other features that are useful to pretty much all devs. AWS, for example, has a 'free tier' which is very generous. Some things are free for 12 months, some are free forever (for light usage). They do this, so people like me will try them out, play around, and see what they can do, without having to pay anything. Then we're more likely to incorporate those things into production workloads that might end up costing money eventually.
AWS Lambda is one of my favorite things right now. You upload code (python 2.x and 3.x are fully supported), including a zip file with any libraries you import, and then aws spins up a virtual server just to run your code, and kills the server after a few minutes of inactivity. The tooling around it is incredible. Zappa (https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa) for example, packages up Flask apps, reads your requirements.txt file for dependencies, zips those dependencies up for you, deploys to Lambda, sets up AWS Gateway routes, CloudWatch/XRay logging, etc. Which means you can very easily, without making any code changes at all, have a full flask app running in aws, for free, forever (Lambda's free tier is permanent, not 12 months). And the free tier for lambda is extremely generous (I have 3 apps, one using websocket connections, and the other two scheduled to run every few minutes, and my bill is $0).
It's so much cooler than I thought it could be, which makes me wonder what else I've been missing out on. What's some cool tech you've seen lately or played around with?