I've been researching for something that I plan to deploy properly. This looks like a good start!
I've been working on a secret project lately. It's something that I plan to support & deploy properly. That's not what I'm writing about today, though!
In my research to properly support & deploy this project, I've been learning a lot about docker & containerization, as well as Kubernetes as a solution to deploy these containers. In the mean time though, I'm still prototyping this idea so I figured I'd look for something simple.
Once my code was updated to support Docker, I googled around and decided to try Google Cloud. So far, it's been great. At first, I had a hard time understanding the differences between the Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, and "Cloud Run" services. After a weekend of reading, I finally understand the need for each service. I decided I'd spin up a small VM in the Google Compute Engine service running a container-optimized OS.
Once I did that, I left it alone and moved on to other stuff, like implementing some CI/CD with Google Cloud Build + Github. That was pretty simple to set up.
By the time I was done preparing Google Cloud for my code, I had created a:
Cloud Build
(To Store Auto-Generated Docker Containers)
CloudSQL server
Compute Engine VM instance
My lovely girlfriend brought up pricing, trying to gauge how much I was investing in this prototype.
It was my understanding that hosting my code would be free, as is Google's Free Tier, but that lead me into some more research.
Looking at the Free Tier link, I noticed that they had no mention of CloudSQL. Even on the CloudSQL "Pricing" page & service page, there was no reference to a free tier.
Their free tier page does, however, mention "Firestore", which might be good enough for what I need and it says I get 1Gb of storage for free. I think that should be plenty considering I don't expect this thing to blow up overnight.
The best part about using cloud services though, is that I won't have to worry in case it does!
So, I'm going to change my approach and store my data on their document-based databases instead of SQL. I also noticed that my VM was too large! Their free tier only supports up to 1 f1-micro VM, so I had to size that down.
Their offerings are very generous, though, so I should be able to build my tech off this till it becomes popular!
Thanks for reading!