[ale] Difficulty of philosophy changes

[JD]

2x$450 Core i7 boxes will go a VERY long way towards building a lab.
* Not power sucking ... er ... too much
* Not noisy like "server" hardware
* Easily upgraded, since these are desktop systems
* $900 total (one-time) is cheaper than $20/month linodes plus these will have
enough CPU/RAM to support 30+ VMs easily (or 60+ LXC instances).

You can learn a bunch with 10 VMs - not much more with 100, just sayin'.

Puppet - eewwwww.  Ansible, but that is personal preference.

For those people claiming my idea of cheap electrical power is off .... I have 6
running systems here - 24/7 for the last 7+ yrs and I'm staring at the November
GA Power bill - $72.53. I think each of those costs $1-$2 a month to run,
including the networking, VoIP, monitors and disk arrays. The household power
bill without computers is about $60/month (when no A/C is needed).

Personally, I won't touch used servers. They are power sucking, heat generating,
noise makers.  Any "server" over 3 yrs old needs to be recycled, IMHO. The
power, noise, heat profile has changed tremendously in recent years.

And last time I looked a few years ago, one, introductory, EC2 micro instance
was free for the first year.

For really cheap VPSes, ChicagoVPS seems popular with the DC404 crowd. I suspect
those are probably LXC instances, not even openvz or paravirtual Xen. Know what
you are getting, so you aren't disappointed.

On 11/15/2014 08:33 AM, Leam Hall wrote:
> I've been working on changing my philosophy for a while now, and it's rough.
> Moving from "must hand do everything" to learning Puppet. Accepting that a
> perfectly tuned platform tomorrow is less useful than a functional one today.
> 
> My next hurdle is moving personal development platforms off my personal
> hardware. It's been nice to have stuff running on my own laptop but at the same
> time the hardware is old, the OS is old (but duplicates work OS), and I'm
> getting old. I don't want to have to rebuild everything when the disk takes a dive.
> 
> Yeah, I have backups. But everything slows to a crawl when I have to restore to
> get everything done, and then to find the one bit I forgot to backup.
> 
> Any good recommendations for small instance cloud providers? I know AWS and
> Rackspace but have not paid attention to others yet. My goal is to spin up
> servers, learn Puppet and stuff, and spin them down. Only paying for uptime. RAM
> and disk needs are pretty minimal. However, even an AWS micro instance is
> ~$60/month if you forget that you have it and forget that it's on...
> 
> So, I could use a place to play that's not on my old hardware. Thoughts?
> 
> Leam