Tonight on GeekNights, we revisit the topic of hosting we last covered in 2006. From simple web hosting to SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and even Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service), a lot has changed. Amazon EC2 didn't even exist when we did that first episode. In the news, Vimeo moves further into B2B, Twitch pauses its "porn on the front page" feature, Amazon is reportedly censoring interesting words like "union" in its new internal app.
Things of the Day
Episode Links
When I saw the YouTube live stream title, I expected it to be a new Visigoths episode, about hosting parties or having people stay at your home for a weekend. I’m disappointed it’s just more computer jargon.
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I couldn’t get through this episode.
Rym, it’s okay to skip recording until you are feeling better. Just turning away from the microphone wasn’t enough to keep from hearing the coughing, wheezing, snivelling, snorting, etc. You need a cough button, or or at least put your side of the audio through a sound gate filter, or something like that.
Self-hosting lambdas:
Ok, you’re not going to, but it is possible. The underlying tech is called firecracker, and it’s open source:
https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/
It might provide equivalent functionality, but it’s not literally the same thing. You can’t just change a few configuration settings in your application and redeploy your app locally. Whereas if you are using say, AWS elasticache, you can move to self-hosted memcached seamlessly.
Digital ocean is increasing their prices. Looks like now droplets come in $6 increments instead of 5. They’re also adding a $4 droplet if you can run in 512MB of rams.
The smallest Linode is 1GB of RAM and $5 a month. $4 for 512MB doesn’t seem great. But hey, if your app only needs 512, that’s still $1/month savings.