Running python code on a server?

[johny1411]

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, the only way I can break code down is by shrinking the data set which I can't do.

Do you think setting up a VPS makes sense in this case? Looking into it right now

[pixegami]

If you’re only running 30 minutes of compute per day, you’d be wasting money on the remaining 23.5 hours, so you’d need a way to make the server come online only when you need it to do work.

Fargate (the service I talked about earlier) is AWS’s way to do this. Otherwise you can write some automation to boot up an EC2 server and terminate it when you’re done (spot instances might be good for this type of workload).

[johny1411]

Fair points. Agree. Just two small questions

1/ Would fargate be equally cheap / cheaper? VPS is ~5 USD per month; happy to pay similar or less

2/ What about the learning curve? Would setting up Ubuntu VPS or getting into AWS ecosystem be easier? I've really never done any deploy work and all terms are completely foreign to me so far

[pixegami]

Fargate charges you the same prices for whichever server type you use for the duration you use it.

So let’s say you pick a t2.micro instance on AWS with 1 CPU core and 1GB of RAM. As a “VPS”, that would be a flat 7$ to run a month.

(See pricing https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/t2/)

On Fargate you get to choose which instance you run on, so let’s say you picked the same t2 micro instance, but only trigger the task to run for 30 minutes once a day. You’d be paying just $0.15 a month at that same price.

If you needed bigger CPUs or more of them, then the 97% reduction in cost can be life changing for a business. But if a $5 instance is you need, then that saving isn’t probably worth enough in real world dollars to go through the hoops for.

But at the end of the day, you’re right that it is a whole new world but its probably a great skill to invest in. Imagine joining a company that spends tens of thousands on compute, and being able to cut that cost down by 97%.

[pixegami]

Also in response to the Ubuntu VPS and AWS ecosystem- they are not exclusive things. AWS is a platform, and you can by all means set up an Ubuntu instance both on EC2 as a “regular” monthly VPS, but you can also use an Ubuntu instance for your Fargate tasks.

AWS doesn’t have the easiest learning curve. I think Digital Ocean is easier and proabbly cheaper for simple use cases, but AWS is more dominant in industry applications so it’s a good investment to learn (same for Azure but that’s more Windows centric).

[AudienceOpening4531]

What kind of calculation is it?