Choosing a free server in the cloud for test purposes, home projects, etc.

    I always wanted to get acquainted with cloud services, but in my work they were either not used, or not in my department. I did not really want to pay my money for such an acquaintance, and all this seemed rather complicated. A bunch of different tariffs, something for free, something for a fee. But in fact, everyone can figure it out and most importantly easily. So easy that you simply have to get your own free cloud server right now. It remains only to choose which one.

    This article will be useful to those who have not yet used cloud servers.



    A free cloud server can be used for various purposes:

    • testing (you can install any software before implementing it on a working project)
    • home project (you can raise a web server, a database and everything you need)
    • monitoring (external monitoring of the site or home computer, for example, the grafana + Influxdb + telegraf stack )
    • proxy / vpn (to bypass locks and spoof the country on the necessary sites)

    Consider the most popular representatives of cloud services that provide the so-called "Free Tier".

    Microsoft azure


    • $ 200 for 1 month (up to 14 virtual machines)
    • additional free services after the end of the free period

    Suitable for one-time load testing of a large project before launching into production.

    Amazon webservices


    • EBS: 30 GB SSD or HDD to choose (your virtual machine can use this place)
    • EC2: instance t2.micro 750 hours per month for a year
    • CloudFront: 50 GB CDN
    • 15 GB of traffic per month
    • other free services for a year and after the end of the free period

    Those. You can create a virtual machine with 1 vCPU, 1Gb of RAM and up to 30 GB of disk per year for free. The same configuration (only 2TB traffic) per month in Digitalocean costs $ 10, in Hetzner - 4.6 euros, similar configurations in OVH and Scaleway - 3 euros, in Simplecloud and Ihor - 250 rubles. Those. for a year you save from 36 euros or 3000 rubles.

    Suitable for a test server, organization of external monitoring, your home project or rare use as proxy / vpn.

    Google cloud platform


    • f1-micro instance is free forever (0.2 vCPU, 0.6 GB RAM, 30 GB HDD, 1 GB traffic per month)
    • $ 300 a year (more recently it was only 3 months), enough for g1-small (0.5 vCPU, 1.7 GB RAM, 30 GB SSD, 15 GB traffic per month)

    A free virtual server is suitable for external monitoring, a home page or your home demo project (just don’t try to give links to it on the hub).

    Digital ocean


    • $ 100 for 2 months

    This amount is enough to test which tariff is best for your project, as well as get acquainted with the DO management console.

    Scaleway


    • server for 15 minutes, but registration is not required

    This time is barely enough to test the speed of the network, drives and processor performance.

    For all platforms, you need to associate a phone number and a bank card number. If the first is not critical for me, then as a card number I prefer to specify an electronic virtual card of ilex money or qiwi (so as not to accidentally fall into huge amounts due to inexperience). These cards are issued and reissued for free. For Amazon, you don’t need to put money on the balance, it is only checked that the card is real by trying to withdraw money from the card and receiving information from the bank that the card exists. A friend of mine every year receives a new free cloud server for such cards and test working SIM cards. This is not good and he should be very ashamed.

    So, let's get our first cloud test server. I recommend Amazon because there is no problem with it. But the last thing I want to do is to fight the huge slow-moving registration system in the evening after work, with all my strength.

    Aws


    • Follow the link.
    • We register, indicate the phone number and card.
    • We are waiting for Amazon to try to withdraw about $ 1. In qiwi, this withdrawal attempt will be visible.
    • Our account is activated.
    • We go into the EC2 management console .

    In fact, the control panel is quite simple. But in case you didn’t manage to figure it out right away, I will list the points that I did so that you can make sure that you are going the right way. There are many steps, but all of them are in the style of “further, further, further, ...”. When writing this article, I went through them more than ten times.

    all my steps in the panel
    • Before creating a virtual machine, I go to the left menu "NETWORK & SECURITY -> Key Pairs".
    • Click on the “Import Key Pair”. I select a file with a public key. In Linux systems, it lies in ~ / .ssh / id_rsa.pub. If you do not have it .
    • I go to the left menu "INSTANCES -> Instances". I click on the "launch instance".
    • I see a list of distributions. Only those with the words “Free tier eligible” are suitable for me.
    • In this list I did not find the distribution I needed.
    • I press in the left menu on the "AWS Marketplace".
    • I indicate in the search for "ubuntu".
    • I select in the list “Ubuntu 16.04 LTS - Xenial (HVM)” / “Free tier eligible”. I press on "select".
    • A huge scary price window opens up. Scroll down. I click on "continue".
    • I put a check in the line with t2.micro / "Free tier eligible".
    • Click on Review and Launch.
    • Amazon warns that port 22 is open to the whole world, but I do not pay attention.
    • In the “AMI Details” section, I verify that “Hourly Software Fees: $ 0.00 per hour on t2.micro instance”.
    • In the "Storage" section, I check that I fit in 30 GB, usually a virtual machine takes about 8GB.
    • I press "Launch".
    • A window opens with a choice of authorization method on the created server.
    • I select the previously uploaded public key as authorization.
    • I click the checkmark that I agree with everything. I press the "Launch Instances" button.
    • I turn to the list of instances (Left menu "INSTANCES -> Instances").
    • I look at the IP of the running virtual machine (abcd).
    • I go to the server via ssh: "ssh root @ abcd".
    • The error is: Please login as the user "ubuntu" rather than the user "root".
    • I go to the server via ssh: "ssh ubuntu @ abcd".
    • Mission accomplished.

    If you’re not very tired at work, like difficulties, and have a couple of extra nights, then welcome to Google.

    Gcp


    • Follow the link.
    • We register, indicate the phone number and card.
    • Google complains that the map is not suitable. I put 100 rubles on it and everything is ok.
    • I received a letter “Welcome to the Google Cloud Platform free trial” in the mail.
    • We go to the management console .

    Then everything should be simple ...

    ... but not with Google.
    Nothing works in the console, even a free perpetual server cannot be created. A letter came to the mail “Our system recorded suspicious actions in your billing account. As a precaution, we temporarily blocked this account. ”

    Actually asking for two things:

    • Upload an image of your government-issued photo ID
    • Upload an image of your credit card, debit card, or bank statement

    This is my first GCP account and I have not performed any suspicious activity with it. Most likely in this way Google is protected from repeated registrations by unscrupulous users.

    I sent a photo of my passport and bank statement (qiwi has the ability to make an extract). I received thanks from Google for the documents sent, but they still want to see a photo of my card. I am sending a photo of a virtual card from the monitor screen (in the letter there was information that photos of electronic documents are suitable).

    I received gratitude from Google for the documents sent, but prepaid and virtual bank cards are not accepted .

    It would not be bad for them to write this immediately upon registration or at least in the first letter - they would save me a lot of time.

    I tried the vtb24 card (although it expired after a month) - it did not fit. I ordered a Yandex Money card, waited until it reaches me, but still an error “ An unexpected error occurred. Try again later .. ”, and the money is withdrawn and then returned after some time. Now I have tempered an additional bank card of the Bank of Cyprus, I waited, again a mistake. It also turned out that my colleague had problems with the Tinkoff card. I never thought that I would write this, but I do not recommend using the cloud hosting service from Google.

    By the way, I recently needed a CDN at work, how do you think that we chose Amazon or Google?

    It took me several months to fight Google, several bank cards and several million neurons. As you can understand, I can’t recommend the cloud service of the “company of good”; moreover, I have repeatedly written complaints to the FAS about Google’s advertising, which, to put it mildly, misleads the user. I took screenshots, quoted the terms of use of the service ... but thank God I did not send it. He left this decision the next day, and there he was already letting go. While I was collecting documents for the complaint, it dawned on me what it was.

    After the introduction of " tax on Google"(according to which it and other foreign companies are obligated to pay VAT for private users) Google changed the type of accounts from individuals to legal in order to outweigh the duties from themselves to the users themselves. But apparently forgot that his proposal" 300 dollars for 12 months "may use only an individual.

    As a result, on the one hand we get an advertisement where the option to choose an individual is physically blocked:



    and on the other hand, an agreement that says that nothing shines for us:



    But on the third hand, instead of the normal answer that it is impossible, we get unreadable errors: “An unexpected error occurred. Please try again later ... Error code: OR-IEH-01. ” during map binding. To be honest, I did not expect such a setup from Google. Any desire to try their service was gone.

    After all this story, I paused the article and returned to it after a couple of months. Moreover, I was still able to figure out how to get to know their platform without using the free period. By the way, while you are trying to unblock your account, in order to finally use it at this very time, the countdown report reduces the number of days in all.



    It is enough to abandon the free period, confirm consent to payment, and after that the opportunity to use the console for free and create a lifetime-free server opens up.

    all my steps in the panel
    • I go to the left menu of the Compute Engine
    • VM instances -> Create
    • In the “Machine Type” list, select “f1-micro micromachine”
    • In the "Zone" list you need to select the one for which a free server is allowed, otherwise you will pay money for it. For example, when you select "us-east1-c", the inscription "This month you can use the f1-micro instance for free for the first 720 hours" appears, and when you select "us-east4-c" it disappears. Be careful! I would like to create a free server in Europe, but unfortunately the only available zones are: us-central1, us-east1, us-west1.
    • In the "Bootable disk" field, select "Ubuntu 17.04"
    • In the field "SSH keys" I insert my public key
    • I click on the create button
    • I look at the external IP of the running virtual machine (abcd).
    • I go to the server via ssh: "ssh root @ abcd".
    • The error is: Please login as the user "ubuntu" rather than the user "root".
    • I go to the server via ssh: "ssh ubuntu @ abcd".
    • Mission accomplished.


    When installing various packages, remember that you only have 1 gigabyte of traffic per month.

    I hope that the article will be useful and the six months spent on it were not in vain. Now I can safely proceed to write a new article about the recent highloadcup event .

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    Have you used cloud servers yet?

    • 20.9% Used Microsoft Azure 138
    • 42.4% Used Amazon Webservices 279
    • 14.2% Used Google Cloud Platform 94
    • 32.5% Used DigitalOcean 214
    • 6.2% Used Scaleway 41
    • 16.8% Used a different cloud platform 111
    • 34.8% Used a dedicated / virtual server on traditional hosting 229

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