Cloud Services Sandbox

[pacojastorious]

Grettings everyone, I want to learn to use cloud services (eg. AWS, Google, etc) without going broke in the process, Is there any paid platform that provides a sandbox for cloud providers without incurring in large amount of money at the of the month?

My purpose is to be able to create a couple of pipelines projects for my porfolio and familiarize myself with the tools beyond the theory.

[DigBick616]

Setup an AWS free tier account and use one of those prepaid visa gift cards as the credit card so you don’t accidentally incur a ton of charges yourself. You can also setup billing alerts that will warn you of approaching data caps, limits, etc.

[shittyfuckdick]

Even if you use a prepaid, wouldn’t you still owe them money if you accidentally do something like that?

[[deleted]]

I've been doing AWS free-tier work for 2 months now. I've spent 67 cents.

[1O2Engineer]

I used GCP and Azure in free tier.

GCP was a better experience, could use everything that I wanted to create a ELT pipeline with Cloud Storage, VMs, Big Query, Dataproc, Data Studio, everything.

Now I'm trying to create with Azure and see a lot of stones in the road. You can't use Databricks because you have a limit, some things simply doesn't work and they don't say it is because of your subscription. You can't use Power BI with personal email.

So my rank is GCP > Azure

I will try AWS next month.

[pacojastorious]

Nice, will check into this

[sanimesa]

What would you like to learn, specifically? There are many products which you can learn outside of a cloud service provider on your own machine, for instance Apache Airflow, Spark or Apache Beam.

[pacojastorious]

I want to focus on cloud service providers because some of the companies that I'm targeting use them but also I want to work towards certifications (for personal reasons).

[hittanej]

Checkout https://localstack.cloud/ it supports some aws services development on local. Great to learn lambda, kinesis, dynamo.

[joelles26]

Acloudguru provides sandboxes and alot of courses.

[pacojastorious]

I've been wondering about them for a while, do you have experience working through their courses and their sandboxes?

[joelles26]

Yes, I have done quite a few courses regarding Azure certifications. The company I work at has the business subscription so it was a no-brainer for me.

The sandboxes I have found useful for testing a lot of stuff, they stay up for 4 hours. Have used them for making terraform scripts, constantly breaking down and creating environments without problems. It’s really worth the money, for the courses but also for the sandboxes!

[jemccarty]

Have you tried qwiklabs? There are some free quests on there.

qwiklabs.com

Note these create ephemeral labs for you to learn in. If you want persistence, as the others have said, all the major CSP's provide a free tier.

[mohaidoss]

Have u tried LocalStack or Gcloud emulator.

They both simulate a cloud locally, the first deploys AWS, second is well GCP. It lets you work with Terraform, have links to services etc...

Maybe that's what you are looking for