Generic cloud machines

August 23, 2016 — July 26, 2021

computers are awful
concurrency hell
number crunching
premature optimization
workflow
Figure 1

Occasionally I do stuff in the cloud that is not data science in the cloud. Mostly file sync or DIY socials. For these purposes I do not require complicated orchestration of scalable kubernetes clusters to run my high availability microservices architecture or what-have you. I do not want backups; the service will probably be a host-proof p2p service or something else easily recreated if it falls down. What I do want is

  1. cheap storage, and
  2. cheap VMs/containers.

General considerations: Is a billion-dollar worth of server lying on the ground? tl;dr Amazon is weirdly expensive. Why not go, e.g. OVH? Is it strictly because they have fewer HOWTOs?

Not covered: Digital Ocean because they are too expensive.

AWS are not that cheap in list price, or in time. Last time I tried to use them I burned a whole day trying to understand their insane control panel when to upload weird XML snippets to mysterious API endpoints in order to do a relatively simple CPU-and-storage setup. The whole time I know that if I got it wrong, the russian mafia would steal my data.

Figure 2: The new OVH logo