Hello spk_, the necessary credits have successfully been allocated to your account. We’d love to hear your feedback—share your thoughts and you can earn another $15 in credits!
Here are some feedback/questions:
1. I was logged in via ssh and when I tried the web shell it kicked me and the machine went unreachable.
2. How can I restrict who can access my machine? There is no allowed IPs section.
3. Can I upload my ssh-key somewhere and use that as a default whenever I launch an instance?
4. Why do I even have images section when I can't take a snapshot and keep it as a image? This would be very handy so that I don't need to repeat the basic setup of my instances.
5. Can I have a auto shutdown based on time? I don't want to accidentally leave my machine running and rake up a huge cost.
There's something odd about the pricing in the invoice, I assume you are doing per second billing? I ran a test instance for a few mins and this is what I see in the invoice:
CPU Usage - Intel Xeon v3 1.5333 hours $0.044467
Storage Usage - NVMe 3.3333 hours $0.000333
Public IP Address 0.4000 hours $0.002200
The price seems to be ok but the units are way off.
1. That’s interesting and it shouldn’t happen. I just tested it myself and was able to connect via both VNC and Terminal at the same time. I’ll check with the team to see if there’s an issue.
2. We don’t impose any physical firewalls on the VMs, but you can set up a virtual firewall of your choice and limit IP access.
3. We try to avoid storing any critical customer information. Public key authentication is possible, but you’ll need to share your key each time on the deployment page. We’ll explore ways to save the key securely!
4. It is possible to create images. This was automated before, but we recently had to switch to a manual process due to changes in our hypervisor software. If you reach out to support, they can create images from your VM and attach them to your billing profile, usually within a day.
5. This is a feature we don’t currently have, but it’s definitely something we’ll consider adding to our roadmap!
Regarding pricing: Every resource is billed on a per-minute basis. For instance, if you have 100GB of storage, the system will record 100 minutes of NVMe usage every minute. The same applies to vCPUs and GPUs. I hope that clarifies things, but if you need further details please feel free to ask.
Thanks a lot for the feedback, really appreciate it! We’ve gone ahead and applied the remaining credits to your account.
I use AWS EC2 for various side projects and experiments. A while back, I forgot to shut down an instance and didn’t realize until I got a pretty hefty bill at the end of the month.
To avoid this in the future, I built a simple CLI tool called Autostopper. It automatically stops your EC2 instances after a set duration, so you don't have to worry about leaving them running longer than you need. It’s free and open source, and I figured others might find it useful too.
What an amazing tool! Certainly going to integrate into some of my codebases. I am actually fascinated by your charts, would you mind sharing which library did you use? I would love to use that in some of my personal projects.
This is great. Out of curiosity, why not just wrap this as a standalone addon? Not questioning your decision btw, just thinking that the current approach may increase your hosting cost, no?
Absolutely! I am not a mathematician but enjoyed Maths thoroughly during my school and college. Especially differential calculus and discrete maths during school, and probability & statistics during my college.
Very good list! I have been using the simple http server for a very long time now, but never knew about the other ones. Xonsh looks amazing, definitely going to add it to my repertoire. Thanks for that.
This is tremendously helpful. I can use one of the ideas in hear to experiment with new programming languages! Thanks very much for putting this together.
"it might stand to dethrone the venerable Flurry screensaver" - You are absolutely right. The first time I saw the screensaver, I was completely mesmerized and watched it for a few minutes before getting back to work.
Out of curiosity, why Rust? Not saying anything against it, just looking to understand your take on it.
1. It absolutely had to run in the browser.
2. I wanted the option of shipping native binaries later on, e.g. screensavers
This narrows the choice to something that can compile to WASM and has bindings for WebGL/OpenGL. Rust has substantial support for these technologies, there's an active graphics community, and, personally, it felt approachable for someone without experience with C/C++.
Also, I write Haskell/Elm for a living. I don't need much convincing to pick up another typed, memory-safe language.
