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Comment by cpkpad | Hacker News Reader

Well, the costs are nicer, but mostly, Glacier goes from an unusable pricing model to a usable one. I was terrified to use Glacier. The previous model, if you made requests too rapidly, you might be hit with thousands of dollars of bills for relatively small data retrievals -- very easy to make a very expensive bug.

I had wanted Amazon to wrap it in something where they managed that complexity for a long time. Looks like they finally did.

Now the only thing Amazon needs to do is expand free tiers on all of their services, or at least very low cost ones. I prototype a lot of things from home for work -- kinda 20% time style projects where I couldn't really budget resources for it. The free tier is great for that. All services ought to have it -- especially RDS. I ought to be able to have a slice of a database (even kilobytes/tens of accesses/not-guaranteed security/shared server) paying nothing or pennies.

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> The previous model, if you made requests too rapidly, you might be hit with thousands of dollars of bills for relatively small data retrievals -- very easy to make a very expensive bug.

Glacier has supported for something like 18 months now, the ability to put a policy on your vault that capped your maximum retrieval cost. Whenever your request would cause you to exceed that limit, it would get throttle response that the SDK handles happily. I've used it when I needed to retrieve a whole bunch of data and wanted to do it faster than the free tier supported. I set it at $5 and just left the retrieval running.

A t2.large costs 10 cents/hour, a t2.medium RDS instance costs 7 cents/hour. If you put in 50 hours/month on this side project, that's $8.50 for compute plus maybe $3 for ~ 30GB of storage.

$11.50/month doesn't sound too hard to budget for.

It might be more about bureaucracy than about cost. At my last job even small expenses would require printing forms and getting the CFO to sign them, so in the end it was pretty much not worth it for small tests.

Your work can't give you a few VMs in a lab somewhere that you can get free rein to prototype on? That is usually not too hard to get..

it seems the idea of the Amazon free tier is to give people a taste of AWS so they can decide to go in more or not. It's not really designed to be a free prototype for existing large customers product. Like the other poster said, you can host a tiny VM for $6 or so a month, not a big expense.

If you are asking for $4000 a month production cluster, yes that is harder to just get..

I run dozens of small side projects off a $10/mo DigitalOcean server. I do not mind paying that absurdly low amount.

Agreed.

Glacier was, from my point of view, literally unusable. Now, it's usable. I still may not use it but at least I can.

RDS does have a free tier: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/free/

While cool, this is only valid for the first 12 months of an AWS account.

I've seen people suggest this a lot when someone is asking for hosting advice. Do people just make new accounts every year or something?

Yes, that's what I do and it's pretty much encouraged when I asked AWS if it was allowed.

I dunno, I've never done that, too much of a pain :/

I've been doing that every year since 2007! You can even use the same credit card information.

Dynamo might fill this need for you; you can provision a 1/1 table for less than a dollar per month and just put everything in it. Dynamo will bank some provisioned throughput for you to allow bursting, and the client apis all implement exponential backoff in the event of a throttle, so a 1/1 table isn't nearly as scary as you might initially think.

Of course, then you're using Dynamo.

Is there a common perception of DynamoDB? Or are you just referring to the old Dynamo?

Same about prototypes! I wonder how many other people have created really great products for their company doing the same thing. It would be in any company's best interest to provide free tiers for experimentation.

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