Cloud Deployment 101: A Comparison of Free Tier Options

Cloud Deployment 101: A Comparison of Free Tier Options

Cloud technology is growing rapidly every year. As a software developer/engineer, you must know about cloud technology. Learning cloud Tech is the best investment for your career you can do in 2023. Learning cloud technology is very important, You should have some basic knowledge of it.

For example:- deploying your app, Cloud Instances, Serverless Functions, working with other cloud services, etc.

According to a report by Gartner Inc,

In 2023 worldwide public cloud spending will grow 20.7% to a total of $591.8 billion, up from $490.3 billion in 2022.

That's a lot and opportunities are endless. Suppose you are a beginner in the cloud and don't know which cloud provider to choose. Don't worry, Here I'm going to share some of the popular cloud providers and their free tier services. So it will be easy for you to choose the right cloud provider to learn and suitable for your tech stack as per your needs.

Why you should learn Cloud Technology?

Learning cloud will help you in your tech career. Many Cloud providers offer certification for their cloud services. Certifications like Solution architect by AWS and Google Cloud associate by Google cloud, are great.

To get Cloud Certification all you need to do is Learn about cloud concepts/services, Register for the certification exams, Take the exam, and get certified. Cloud Certifications are high in demand in tech industries and can offer you industry recognition, high-paying job opportunities, and staying up-to-date with cloud technologies.

There are many cloud providers in the market. Some popular cloud providers are Amazon Web services(AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. There are many cloud startups and other cloud providers in the market like digital Ocean and CivoCloud as well.

Here I'm sharing some details of the top cloud provider's services and their free tiers. So it will be easy for you to choose the right cloud providers as per your needs.

1. Amazon Web Services

  • EC2 - 750 hours per month of t2.micro or t3.micro(12mo). 100GB egress per month.

  • EBS - 30GB per month of General Purpose (SSD) or Magnetic(12mo).

  • Elastic Load Balancer - 750 hours per month(12mo)

  • Lamba - 1 million requests per month

  • CloudFront - 1TB egress per month

  • Cloudwatch - 10 custom metrics and 10 alarms

  • CodeBuild - 100min of build time per month

  • CodeCommit - 5 active users,50GB storage, and 10000 requests per month

  • CodePipeline - 1 active pipeline per month

  • DynamoDB - 25GB NoSQL DB

  • RDS - 750 hours per month of db.t2.micro, db.t3.micro, or db.t4g.micro, 20GB of General Purpose (SSD) storage, 20GB of storage backups

  • Glacier - 10GB long-term object storage

  • SNS - 1 million publishes per month

  • SES - 62.000 messages per month

  • SQS - 1 million messaging queue requests

  • Full, detailed list - aws.amazon.com/free

2. Google Cloud

  • App Engine - 28 frontend instance hours per day, 9 backend instance hours per day

  • Cloud Firestore - 1GB storage, 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes, 20,000 deletes per Project

  • Compute Engine - 1 non-preemptible e2-micro, 30GB HDD, 5GB snapshot storage (restricted to certain regions), 1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month

  • Cloud Storage - 5GB, 1GB network egress

  • Cloud Shell - Web-based Linux shell/basic IDE with 5GB of persistent storage. 60 hours limit per week

  • Cloud Pub/Sub - 10GB of messages per month

  • Cloud Functions - 2 million invocations per month (includes both background and HTTP invocations)

  • Cloud Run - 2 million requests per month, 360,000 GB-seconds memory, 180,000 vCPU-seconds of compute time, 1 GB network egress from North America per month

  • Google Kubernetes Engine - No cluster management fee for one zonal cluster. Each user node is charged at standard Compute Engine pricing

  • BigQuery - 1 TB of querying per month, 10 GB of storage each month

  • Cloud Build - 120 build minutes per day

  • Cloud Source Repositories - Up to 5 Users, 50 GB Storage, 50 GB Egress

  • Google Colab - Free Jupyter Notebooks development environment.

  • Full, detailed list - cloud.google.com/free

3. Microsoft Azure

  • Virtual Machines - 1 B1S Linux VM, 1 B1S Windows VM (12mo)

  • App Service - 10 web, mobile or API apps (60 CPU minutes/day)

  • Functions - 1 million requests per month

  • DevTest Labs - Enable fast, easy, and lean dev-test environments

  • Active Directory - 500,000 objects

  • Active Directory B2C - 50,000 monthly stored users

  • Azure DevOps - 5 active users, unlimited private Git Repos

  • Azure Pipelines — 10 free parallel jobs with unlimited minutes for open source for Linux, macOS, and Windows

  • Microsoft IoT Hub - 8,000 messages per day

  • Load Balancer - 1 free public load-balanced IP (VIP)

  • Notification Hubs - 1 million push notifications

  • Bandwidth - 15GB Inbound(12mo) & 5GB egress per month

  • Cosmos DB - 5GB storage and 400 RUs of provisioned throughput

  • Static Web Apps — Build, deploy and host static apps and serverless functions, with free SSL, Authentication/Authorization, and custom domains

  • Storage - 5GB LRS File or Blob storage (12mo)

  • Cognitive Services - AI/ML APIs (Computer Vision, Translator, Face detection, Bots...) with free tier including limited transactions

  • Cognitive Search - AI-based search and indexation service, free for 10,000 documents

  • Azure Kubernetes Service - Managed Kubernetes service, free cluster management

  • Event Grid - 100K ops/month

  • Full, detailed list - azure.microsoft.com/free

4. Oracle Cloud

  • Compute - 2 x64-based with 1 GB RAM each, 4 Arm-based Ampere A1 cores, and 24 GB of memory usable as one VM or up to 4 VMs

  • Block Volume - 2 volumes, 200 GB total (used for computing)

  • Object Storage - 10 GB

  • Load balancer - 1 instance with 10 Mbps

  • Databases - 2 DBs, 20 GB each

  • Monitoring - 500 million ingestion data points, 1 billion retrieval datapoints

  • Bandwidth - 10 TB egress per month, speed limited to 50 Mbps on x64-based VM, 500 Mbps * core count on ARM-based VM

  • Public IP - 2 IPv4 for VMs, 1 IPv4 for load balancer

  • Notifications - 1 million delivery options per month, 1000 emails sent per month

  • Full, detailed list - oracle.com/cloud/free

5. IBM Cloud

  • Cloud Functions - 5 million executions per month

  • Object Storage - 25GB per month

  • Cloudant database - 1 GB of data storage

  • Db2 database - 100MB of data storage

  • API Connect - 50,000 API calls per month

  • Availability Monitoring - 3 million data points per month

  • Log Analysis - 500MB of daily log

  • Full, detailed list - ibm.com/cloud/free

Choose any of the cloud providers you like, but I recommend choosing AWS( Amazon Web Services ). It has a wide range of services, flexibility, and scalability. It's a one-stop shop for your apps needs from cloud computing.

Now you can choose which cloud provider you want to go with. Each one of the cloud providers is great. Their process or method to work with different technologies might be different but they do the same task in the end.

Conclusion

After getting to know different cloud providers, now trying to explore cloud technologies more. Learn to use different cloud services in your app. You can also learn about designing large-scale distributed cloud apps and many more.

By the end of this article, you should have a good understanding of the basics comparison of Cloud Providers and which one you should for your app. If you’d like to learn more about Cloud technologies, there are plenty of resources available online, including tutorials, books, and video courses.

Please Feel free to comment and share your suggestions/thoughts 😊

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