I am curious at what scale do you justify using containers.
I was just messing around in AWS making a cluster left it over night (few days), I had a $10 bill. Which is fine but yeah, in contrast my person apps/sites have been running on a $5/mo VPS.
Anyway it's still cool to know/eventually use this somewhere but I'm concerned how you keep it fresh if you don't personally use it.
edit: I left it on longer than that (90+hrs) but yeah, other one was EC2 NAT gateway hours
I start with containers, even if we're deploying single binaries. Local repo of the prod environment is incredibly useful when you inevitably need it. GitHub actions/Gitlab CI build containers out of the box, and deploy to ecs/kubernetes/digitalocean/whatever straight out of the box.
I can set up a CD pipeline on a fresh project to AWS with github actions in about 15 minutes that I will never need to touch again until the app grows to a scale that I can't develop and run it as one person. For anything other than a literal toy project the payback period is roughly the length of time it takes me to make a coffee while I wait for an ec2 instance or fargate cluster.
What's your bill like? Or I guess it depends on each person's interest in the cost but yeah. Maybe it doesn't have to be expensive if you do it from a "raw" way.
"it depends", but mostly I don't care, it's a rounding error compared to developer time. Digitalocean lets you deploy containers onto app service so you could do it for $5/month there. On AWS you can do it for about $15.
> Maybe it doesn't have to be expensive if you do it from a "raw" way.
If you look at straight $$$ cost sure, but the moment you take any development time into consideration you want to build on abstractions. Sure I could run docker on ec2 on a t2 micro behind the free tier, but if it takes me half a day to set up and I make $50k/year, it will take almost a year of it being free to pay off the cost of running it in fargate. _This_ is where AWS saves you money, not on buying compute from ec2.
Fargate is excellent. It takes the machine management and host management out of running containers. If you run docker on ec2, you need to manage the scaling of the hosts and containers, and also the packing of both. With fargate you just say "I want 1 vcpu and 2gb ram, and scale at 80% utilisation". Ive worked on projects that were too big to be cost effective to run with that model but for personal projects and for my current job it's excellent.
I was just messing around in AWS making a cluster left it over night (few days), I had a $10 bill. Which is fine but yeah, in contrast my person apps/sites have been running on a $5/mo VPS.
Anyway it's still cool to know/eventually use this somewhere but I'm concerned how you keep it fresh if you don't personally use it.
edit: I left it on longer than that (90+hrs) but yeah, other one was EC2 NAT gateway hours