The Cloud is Your Free Hobby Computer

What is a hobby computer?

What is free?

What is yours?

What is the cloud?

Borrowing Other People's Computers For Your Hobbies Without Paying Any Money

That's kind of an unwieldly title, so that's why I picked the one I did.
But, seriously, when you're using the cloud, that's what you're doing: You're borrowing other people's computers and you'll have to give them back at some point. Often that time is measured in milliseconds.
But, whenever you have your hands on a tool, borrowed or not, you can end up learning and making some useful things.
What I'm going to try to do in the rest of this talk is describe my approach to thinking about and evaluating cloud services:
If it's free, what's the catch?
Will I learn something useful and transferrable in using it?
Can I walk away cleanly with stuff I've made and put it somewhere else?
Or, am I locked in and stuck when I have to give back what I've borrowed?
image credit - http://yoo-hoo-queen.blogspot.com/2011/05/brother-bugs.html

GitHub

GitHub + Raspberry PI = <3

GitHub Pages

GitHub

Git is free as in speech
GitHub is free as in beer
Your stuff stays yours
GitHub is very hackable
Git is hard

So, that's cool: I'm borrowing computers from the folks at GitHub to store my work and publish it on the web.
Git is hard - But, you know, so were hobby computers. There are some GUI apps for git, but it's mainly a command line tool. To really unlock its power, you will need to learn it's strange ways.
Git is free as in speech - in fact, it's the revision control system made for and used in the production of Linux
Free beer - unlimited public repositories, no access limits. The only real catch is that they charge for private usage.
Yours - the nice thing about git is that it's a distributed system and you get backups almost for free because all of your stuff exists in its entirety wherever you've made a clone
Hackable - github offers interesting APIs to access your data and use with other services
image credit - https://octodex.github.com/

Travis CI

So, the intent of Travis CI is run your tests for your code.
What you can see in this screenshot is Travis starting up a Linux machine and running the tests for a video game I was working on.
The neat thing is that it integrates with GitHub. Every time I push out a change, Travis gets a notification via the GitHub API and schedules a fresh test run.
Travis will also get notifications when someone has submitted a Pull Request to propose a change to my project, and so kick off tests to tell me whether this new contribution passes the tests.
image credit - http://blog.travis-ci.com/2013-07-17-introducing-travis-our-new-mascot/

Travis CI + GitHub Pages = <3

Travis CI

Free as in beer
Works with GitHub
Runs your tests (& other code) on demand
Slow during peak usage hours

Heroku

Heroku + GitHub = <3

Heroku + GitHub + Travis CI = <3<3<3

Heroku

Free as in beer
Works with GitHub & Travis CI
Your code works elsewhere
Free apps shut down after inactivity

free beer - for very small apps, heroku is free at least for the low tiers. you can have a little bit of database space, and one web server working for you. And, if you really like it, they have sliders to turn up the available resources along with a handy cost estimate before you commit.
works with github and travis - And this is where it's starting to feel like a hobby computer in the cloud to me: because you're tinkering with all these parts from different companies and wiring them up yourself. Sometimes the connections are easy, but sometimes it takes a little work gluing them together.
your code - Heroku makes a few more demands on your code than Travis, but they're not very big demands. For the most part, whatever you have working on Heroku can be moved to another service provider with just a little bit of tweaking.
inactivity - if you don't use an app for awhile, Heroku will shut it down. It will start up again the next time you try to use it, but there will be a long pause as things come back awake. But, again, this is for free apps and they understandably prioritize paying customers.

Cloud9

Now, everything I've shown so far, still kind of assumes that you're using your own decently powered laptop or desktop at home to do the bulk of your work.
But, what if all you have is a Chromebook or maybe a tablet with keyboard cover? It turns out there's a cloud service for that, too!
Cloud9 is an integrated development environment in the cloud. It's got an editor with a lot of features, works with your projects on GitHub, and it gives you a fully working Linux virtual machine to run your code.
Now, in the free tier, that Linux machine is roughly equivalent to a Raspberry PI. But again, that's okay, because this is like a free sample of their paid service. Still you can have a lot of fun with it, for certain definitions of fun.

Cloud9

Free as in beer
Works with GitHub & Travis CI & Heroku
Your code works elsewhere
Free Linux machine is very tiny

The story so far...

Free as in beer
You can pay for better support
Works well with others
Your can take your stuff with you

Google App Engine

This is an old screenshot of Google App Engine. It's old, because I stopped using it a few years ago. But, at the time, it seemed really promising. It looked a lot like Heroku - that is, a platform as a service with decent tools for updating and managing your app.
And it was cool, because a lot of the tech behind GAE was drawn from things Google was already using for other products. So, you got to benefit from some of the same infrastructure that powered one of the biggest web sites in the world.
But, eventually, it just turned into a curiosity for me and I lost interest. And here's why...
image credit - http://twitter.com/cschalk

Google App Engine

Free as in beer
Self-contained silo of services
Your code only works on GAE
There are a few open source alternatives
There are only a few open source alternatives

free - within reasonable usage limits for hobbyists
siloed - It's a very nice silo and it scales very well using technology drawn from other Google properties. But, it doesn't work well with any other services and its services don't work in isolation from GAE.
locked in - Your code is written to use GAE resources, and those resources look a bit different than anything else. It's very hard to transfer your code or experience to other stacks
open source alternative - there are a few alternatives, but most of them are not very well maintained as far as I can tell. But, really, if you're going to use another cloud provider anyway, why not learn more widely adopted tech?
Google also seems to be moving away from it a bit, since I don't think it ended up being as successful as they'd like. Now they have a broader Cloud Platform product that looks a bit more like stuff from the rest of the industry. But, they seem to have backed away from offering a tier that's indefinitely free like other services, and instead just have a 60-day free trial. So, that doesn't really work well for my hobby usage.

Google Docs

Free as in beer
Works with almost any web service
My spreadsheets are locked-in
Ad supported
Paid "Apps for Work" option available

I can export my sheets to other formats. But, the functional guts, the whole reason I made them part of my cloud hobby computer, don't come with. So, I'm fairly locked in.
And as you're probably aware, free from Google mostly means ad-supported. And that implies a bunch of things, some of which are uncomfortable. Like you're being spied on and your data is being sold. Practically speaking, maybe no big deal. But, it means I won't use this service for anything serious beyond making money in a video game.
To be fair, though, there does exist a paid option targeted at businesses for $5/month. I'm just cheap, and don't want to pay that much for my use cases. So I get what I pay for.

IFTTT

Free as in beer
Works with 150+ services
My recipes are locked-in
No paid support option

Any recipes I make on this thing are locked-in. There are some other services like it, but there's no export feature. So, my best bet is to maybe take screen shots for posterity and manually rebuild things elsewhere.
And to make matters worse, I can't pay for this even if I wanted. I think they're making money by selling some mobile apps? But, I'm not sure. So, even though IFTTT has been around for years, I'm kind of just waiting for the day they get acquired and shutdown or they just run out of money and die.
So, while this thing is doing useful work for me, I feel totally uncomfortable using it for anything that I'd really miss.

Yahoo! Pipes

Free as in beer
Works with RSS feeds everywhere
Pipes are locked-in
No paid support option
Does Yahoo! even know it still exists?

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services these days is kind of like the mother of all clouds. In fact, many of the things I mentioned previously are probably running on it at least partially.
For the purposes of a free hobby computer, AWS has a free tier that you can use for a year as a new customer. Me, I've been a customer since early 2006, before there even was a free tier. But, you can do quite a lot with that before your first year runs out.
Still, that said, much of AWS is so cheap for personal use that it's almost-free beer.
image credit - http://www.astoundcom.com/comparing-cloud-providers%E2%80%99-pricing-models-to-ec2-%E2%80%A6-%E2%80%9Cthe-devil-is-in-the-details%E2%80%9D/

The Cloud is Your Free Hobby Computer

What is a hobby computer?

What is free?

What is yours?

What is the cloud?

Borrowing Other People's Computers For Your Hobbies Without Paying Any Money

GitHub

GitHub + Raspberry PI = <3

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages

GitHub

Travis CI

Travis CI + GitHub Pages = <3

Travis CI

Heroku

Heroku + GitHub = <3

Heroku + GitHub = <3

Heroku + GitHub = <3

Heroku + GitHub + Travis CI = <3<3<3

Heroku

Cloud9

Cloud9

The story so far...

Google App Engine

Google App Engine

Google Docs

Google Docs

IFTTT

IFTTT

IFTTT

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services

Wrapping up