The Weekly Dev - 202244

Cloudy Pricing

I am a developer, I write code and work with machines: preferably Unix boxes of some kind.

I do it all the time, and for the most time is the customer's need to drive some development, the machines are there, the network is there: I don't necessarily need to care about the provisioned resources, because they are in place already.

In latest years access to Linux machines has grown and expanded: I am quite happy about it, it could be a good thing.

Also this Cloud hype that you can pay only for what you use, everything as a subscription. The bottom line seems to be that more people can afford interesting resources for building useful applications.

But has anyone looked for real how much a 'cloud instance' actually costs?

Just to make sure this is not an ad: there is a provider in central Europe from which you can rent out a physical machine with 64Gb of Ram, 12 CPUs and about 1Tb of disk, possibly in Raid1 for just around 50 Euros.

But let's say that you can get the same hardware resources from other providers for just about 100 Euros.

Now, this can seem unpractical to the most of us: maybe even too expensive.

As I see it, with such a machine you can make the following virtual appliances:

  • one mailserver
  • a Git server
  • an HaProxy to serve any kind of backends
  • a VM to store software artifacts
  • a bunch of microservices, let's say some backend
  • a cluster with N instances of Cassandra for data storage
  • general data storage
  • a virtual machine for Lamp applications
  • a backup server

All of this is basically the whole firepower that a Small/Medium Enterprise typically needs for boring infrastructural needs.

If you head straight to AWS, and look for a machine with roughly 64 Gb of ram and about a dozen (virtual) CPUs, you will see the price is about 0.6xx $ per Hour.

My math calculator says that the hourly cost times 24 gives about 15$ a day.

This is about 420$ a month.

It means that a VM in AWS costs just about 8 times more than a bare metal offering.

And for sure offerings like Lambda and the like cost even more on hourly basis...

Plus, I'm pretty sure if you're an organization within Europe, you should have some degree of concerns in sending data out the border... right?

I know how much uncool and out-of fashion that sounds, but... Isn't it rather worth the effort to administer the machine ourselves ?

And, by the way, that's what I do.

Networking

Network Protocols

Source: destroyallsoftware.com

Boring Security

A tool to analyse and export trust bundles (e.g., "ca-certificates") from container images: Paranoia

Source: github.com/jetstack

How to properly authenticate your emails

Source: hackernoon.com


[security] [certificate] [backend] [linux] [git] [cassandra]