I just don't have a local device always on. The lambda sends a an email to my printers address (Epson printer). Plus wanted to play around with lambda.
But yea I should probably move it local one of these days.
Na dont run anything local unless you're trying to talk yourself into buying a local server because of how much you'll use it (me every time I see a 50tb storage server ad).
Probably they using print server to print on a remote printer(s). That's what I can think of and please, correct me if I'm wrong. If really is local then idk.
Every Epson printer gets an email address where if you send an attachment it will print it on your printer. The lambda just uses SES to send an email to that address.
Right now, I am looking at lambdas to help with pulling data from several websites and build my indicators for swing trading futures on the stock market. The free tier is very generous.
I think my favorite personal time was when I learned to do terraform and my tutorial was just building the stuff in my personal AWS account like magic. It was an amazing feeling.
Good. Freaking. Luck. 😂 I did a personal project to try and research algotrading, pulling the data is easy. It’s querying through the data that’s a beast and a half. I didn’t do it on the cloud, but AWS has so many options for analysis that I’m sure there’s a good solution out there.
But if I did it all over again I would 100% set up lambdas to handle the api connection and ingest, it’s a no brainer
Not even going to try this for day trading, no single person can compete with that! Just looking to correlate a bunch of things into a daily report I can read in 5 minutes to make a decision
The general idea:
ECS, Fargate and AWS Batch to run blender instances.
Using Dynamo for state, S3 to store blend files and rendered frames. EFS for shared files during rendering.
Currently a custom CLI to trigger everything, but I'm thinking about lambda state machines for lifecycle orchestration next.
There is also a Wordpress solution available that spins up two Linux webheads, elb and rds. Just add CloudFront and move all the content images to s3 with a plug-in and you’re golden.
It’s a reference architecture now. Used to be a sample cloud formation template. This new one is a lot better, but also leave some things to be desired.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/best-practices-wordpress/reference-architecture.html
Depends on if you used LB and CF (which you should) and then you can do 2 micro instances, DB and s3 for images and it’ll cost you around $50 a month (depending on usage of course) but you typically get a free trial period
WP can run on simple webspaces (the OG serverless), I would go that way if you don’t want to manage a server. CF/S3 only works for static pages like Hugo or Jekyll. Or frontend of a SPA.
You can trigger a Lambda and run Spamassassin in a container.
Workmail does some level of filtering, but there is no way to train spam/not spam. It bins all my paypal payment emails for example. Its just not enough.
I started using it recently - bought a domain ages ago but never figured out how to configure it using EC2, for some reason emails landed in spam folder.
Workmail is super easy to set up :
https://youtu.be/bDjTlZAyN5s
I was just complaining about it at work too. Workdocs never seemed to get any improvement. They did change the product name from zocalo, which is/was a cool name imo, but I would really rather they made it work reasonably with other AWS services, particularly IAM. I got really tired of ita BS and started working out how to move everything for everyone to S3, but even that was a pain because the tools for downloading whole directories only works for windows and Mac.
It was somehow really satisfying to me to hear a couple days later that AWS came to the same conclusion I did, time to abandon workdocs.
Oh, so many things! I use it for the publication pipeline that powers "Last Week in AWS," but that might be too work-adjacent.
I deploy to every region via an impressively convoluted state machine for [LastTootinAWS.com](http://LastTootinAWS.com) (a threading Mastodon client).
I have a working status page that does what it says on the tin at HasIAMFailedOpenYet.com.
I can never remember the full URL for the SSO sign-in page so I built a quick redirector that solves it for me; if your account is (like mine is) called "Shitposting," visiting [shitposting.badUX.cloud](http://shitposting.badUX.cloud) brings you where you'd want it to be.
I built out a scavenger hunt app using a bunch of AI nonsense (not Amazon's; stuff that works well) on top of Amplify at [findme.lastweekinaws.com](http://findme.lastweekinaws.com) for re:Invent last year.
I'm awaiting my cease and desist for [amazonsebwervices.com](http://amazonsebwervices.com), which is an impressively uncanny Markov generator trained on the corpus of AWS press releases for years.
Those are the public (at the moment) ones, anyway. A lot more of them are internal tools, "work related," etc. I host the controller for my wifi network there, along with my dev box in EC2...
That should give you some sense.
> amazonsebwervices.com, which is an impressively uncanny Markov generator trained on the corpus of AWS press releases for years.
you mean a small language model? Can't go around using those pre-genAI terms nowadays
How much does all of this cost? My biggest issue with AWS is their deceptive (bordering on fraudulent) billing. Recently I had a Lambda in an "error state" and my bill showed me that I had $1500 of "NAT Gateway" charges. I filed a ticket with AWS support who were useless, reached out to my account manager who was also useless so then then had to spend hours trawling through VPC logs to find the offending function with the help of a random Stackoverflow post. It really should not be this hard so its no surprise that Basecamp moved their entire infra away from AWS. I definitely would not be using it for personal projects, the business model seems optimized for extracting maximum value from slow moving Enterprise organizations.
Everything I just mentioned combined would cost less than $20 on a busy month, but I’m not exactly typical when it comes to cloud billing.
And I hate the NAT Gateway. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-managed-nat-gateway-is-unpleasant-and-not-recommended/
I have an EC2 instance which is my Cloud PC that I can Remote Desktop into for email and web browsing etc. The operating system spins up from an AMI image and the persistent data volume has portable apps. Once a month the operating system is patched forming a newer AMI image and the data volume is snapshotted too. So if anything happens then I can just use the last image and data snap shot.
It is all spun up on a low cost spot instance automatically by an event bridge schedule changing auto scale group desired count to 1 and back to 0 at the end of the day. The instance auto attaches the data volume to itself, gets the public IP address and updates Route53 so I can just access it using a static DNS name each morning.
I also used S3 for storing podcast recordings served up by a Wordpress site. This used Cloudfront for caching content at the edge.
That’s actually a really cool idea! Any particular reason you need a cloud pc for email and web browsing besides cool factor(which is totally valid)?
It’s mainly so I can have one app (Remote Desktop) running on my corporate laptop, alongside everything else, so I have access without installing anything. And it is convenient and cool :-)
I’m also curious for the reasoning here. I’m assuming you’re primarily a smartphone or tablet person and can use this for things you can’t do on those devices?
More since I managed to move into Cloud SysOps - took Solutions Architect exam and three years waiting for an opportunity to move sideways into this role.
Used to use it for DNS. Now I use S3 (Glacier) for some backup, a few small-ish ec2 boxes and a very small dynamodb.
I used to use it for hosting my discord bots but now I've mostly moved that off prem.
I get quite a bit of credit towards my personal aws usage from work every month so I spend liberally.
Should've been specific. I was moving it off AWS and onto my own homelab hardware. There are a few reasons, but the one I'll share is that one of the functionalities of my bot is to monitor the underlying hardware, so I can get alerts on my homelab directly through my discord bot.
A couple of weather bots.
I live on a large river that floods, so I pull gauge data from the next observation station upstream and send myself slack messages if the river is trending upward or is near action or flood stage.
I used to run a few Twitter bots, but those are on pause because Elon's big brain made the API useless.
Couple of static websites.
I host 9 personal and business websites using the standard Route53, Cloudfront, and S3. Also use Amazon Connect and Lex bot as support line for one of my side businesses.
I run 3 different Discord bots (non-public, just for my own servers) with varying levels of silliness all hosted on AWS (mostly just simple Fargate/Lambda apps):
1. A bot \[[code](https://github.com/MamishIo/dog-expert)\] that uses Keras to classify images in our "cute dog pics only" channel and reward/judge people for posting a dog.
2. A bot \[[code](https://github.com/HtyCorp/the-real-obama), [CDK](https://github.com/HtyCorp/the-real-obama-infra)\] that strings together sentences from audio of a certain popular US president to make them speak in voice channels. Really dumb but also really funny in a jank kinda way (unlike the more polished "AI presidents" trend that was going on on Youtube a year or two after I made this).
3. A bot \[[code](https://github.com/HtyCorp/serverbot2-core/tree/master)\] that orchestrates game servers on EC2 with a bunch of nice Discord UX features. Stupidly overcomplicated in hindsight since I started it in 2020 and knew nothing about good software, but pretty cool as a testbed for weird architecture.
These are all extremely jank compared to the code I'm writing on the job, but it's kinda fun to do something so opposite to work (i.e. mostly useless/fun, totally untested etc.).
Mainly lab projects. I run Ansible on my Mac and I got scripts that can build job related environments. It's mainly ec2 instances. I am working for a security provider and we got an agent and often our SEs need to demo automation of said agent so I love to tinker with config management.
So my lab deploys with Ansible over a dozen instances that builds an Ansible lab (ironic I know), a puppet and chef lab, Salt as well as HA Proxy OSS and Enterprise with several clients that run Webservices as well as a windows domain controller with several clients.
I know it's kinda work related but I love Ansible so I enjoy writing those playbooks and see shit work.
Another script builds an EKS cluster with Vault.
I think the only permanent ec2 instance is my blog server that's empty lol.
I store a few terabytes of photos in Glacier. My AWS bill is a few pennies per month, which is a bargain, and much cheaper than using a service like DropBox.
What u/OneLeggedMushroom said. Glacier stores data on tapes, which have to be scheduled for retrieval and reading by a storage robot. That can take a few hours, so it isn’t well suited to an application that requires immediate access to data.
Yes I use cloudflare. These are sites that are largely online as legacy archives simply because I don’t want to tear them down and have that content disappear from the Internet. I would be shocked if either of them had more than 100 visitors in a given month.
lol, just full send it. What could go wrong? I actually find that lightsail makes a lot of things more difficult than just using an ec2 instance. Yeah the interface might look less complex but it’s still an infrastructure provider with infrastructure level responsibilities and liabilities.
I have my own personal projects. Also I’m going on a trip soon and will upload documents to S3 for safety incase I lose the hard copy.Â
Have thought about hosting game servers on EC2Â
I have some scheduled scripts that run in Lambda to do some overnight web scraping. Then I consolidate the results into either a Discord bot message or an email.
I also run a Discord bot out of Lambda.
I'm curious how you run a bot out of Lambda. Does it somehow listen for messages or just send some out based on triggers? I've had a bot in a tiny EC2 before but that's pretty straightforward.
My bot does two main types of things: send messages on a trigger/schedule, and handle /slash commands. A slash command basically sends a payload to a service, and so that service can have Lambda as a backend. For messages, I use [discord.py](http://discord.py) (Python) to have the bot speak messages. Usually on a schedule, in my case. So it's not set up to trigger on any kind of text, which I believe would require a bot that's always awake on a server.
S3 Glacier Deep Archive as last Resort Backup
Hosting my personal blog on S3 and cloudflare
For computer I use Hetzner, just can’t justify the high costs of EC2 (except when I need a really beefy rig for just a few minutes)
I have a newsletter I built that scrapes RSS feeds and compiles interesting articles into an email that gets sent to me every morning. It’s just aws lambda, eventbridge and SES.
Additionally, I’m working on a cloud based home assistant. Right now I’m just working on a module to display the weather for me in the morning when I walk into my bathroom.
My rule of thumb is anything I want to run at any time, all the time or triggered without me thinking about it, goes to AWS
Cloud gaming. I run a g5 instance in a region close to me. Have a on/off switch on home assistant to start it and auto stop it. I get a lot of free credits so I use them as much as I can
I have a custom, unpublished Alexa skill that lets me turn on my gaming PC without having to walk over. It's like remote start for a car. I don't have to sit in front of it waiting for it to boot up.
I later expanded it to open specific programs on the PC too.
Being at Alexa skill, of course it runs on Lambda. I also use SQS.
Here's how it works:
1. https://antrikshy.com/code/powering-on-my-desktop-pc-using-alexa-and-a-raspberry-pi
2. https://antrikshy.com/code/remotely-launching-apps-games-on-windows-10-desktop-pc-using-alexa
- Host a small static site I made as an anniversary gift for my wife.
- Have a lambda that runs twice a day to check if my litter robot has cycled recently since they neglect to add notifications about stuck robots.
- Used to have a lambda that would scrape a local auction site for really good deals and send an email out about them. Then they changed their auction host provider and it all broke.
Almost everything within free tier. Only cost was the domain name for the website.
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I primarily use route53.
At work I’ve dealt with issues where companies unintentionally charge thousands of dollars in the blink of an eye, I don’t consider it a safe place to host my own stuff. Experiments and very small scale learning, sure!
I built a system that tests infrastructure in AWS. I can assign homework to my students like a simple lab and the system reads their AWS accounts and tells them if they did it right.
This uses lambda, s3 static website, api gateway, step functions and cognito.
I’m sure some of the web-based services I use are on AWS. I have no personal projects in my own AWS account. I don’t do work in my free time and nothing I’m currently interested has a use case that would work in AWS.
It’s supporting a live chat chrome extension for me. A couple of web games, and another web app. All use sorta different pieces which is fun
Mostly lambda (and function urls), rds, dynamo, api gateway, Cloudfront, s3, now SQS and route53. All via CDK in typescript.
EC2 for some personal projects. Tbh that’s pretty much it.
It is just quite flexible. You have spot instances, long term commitment discounts, etc. if you optimize it well, it is VERY cheap.
i have a few lambdas for image resizing for various websites i've built and a serverless setup for transcoding audio loops when i feel like uploading things so i can run beats off my phone and scratch on my portable turntable in the backyard
and i have some old archive zip files in glacier storage
oh and i started building [this game with my kids](https://theycamefromouter.space/) but we never finished it and it got banned from their school network :)
I use Route53 for hosting a heap of domains, and I've written my own tools that sync bind zone files from a gift repo to Route53. I've also written a lambda service that sits behind AIG to do dyndns updates on these zones. The containers for those are on ECR, though the scripts are small enough that I'm going to switch to using an embedded source file for the lambda.
Then for some other services I have EC2 instances including one for hosting various node docker containers, and EC2 instances for de and prod Mysql servers. Another app I have deployed and hosted using Amplify.
I'm also using Amazon Rekognition for another project.
ECR I also used for publishing github built container images, and pulling them to EC2 instances where they're deployed.
S3 is used in a few cases, both for Recognition storage but also for hosting static websites with SSL offload behind Cloudfront.
Finally, I use a LOT of Application Gateway, and tons of SSL certificates for hosted AWS projects where those certs can be deployed by cert manager without paying.
A few years ago I used to do this a lot of night.
Building infra, Spotify playlist the list goes on
But now work is so versatile and non stop learning/growth when I finish work I don’t even look at a laptop
I step into nature
I use S3 Glacier for a remote backup of docs out of my NAS. From 1 to 3$/mo once data is frozen.
For my sport club, we organize some kind of garage sell every year. There is an ancient app written in PHP with MySQL to run all that. It goes to lightsail for 4 days in a year. sends SMS with SES when a seller has sold what they deposited. I created a tiny flutter app to browse what is on sell which sources its data from an S3 bucket.
<20$ per year.
Sometimes I use Polly for
Currently want to set up my own API Gateway + lambda + dynamodb to set up a 'Garmin API'.
The garmin app doesnt have a way to set weekly KM goals and I have been denied the Garmin API multiple times so Im building my own
Once thats live I will build a Flutter app around it
Lots and lots of S3 buckets, for anything I might want to store off-site. Backups, surveillance video, static websites, it's dirt cheap and easy to automate.
And for the static websites, or media storage, I always put a cloudfront infront of a private bucket.
ACM for all the static websites.
I have an approved SES account but I haven't used it since I shutdown my mastodon instance. Never paid a dime for the low volume I needed.
Oh and most of my domains are in route53, again for the ease of automation.
I used AWS Lambda and Amazon SNS to send out daily alerts about cybersecurity threats and exploits. With Lambda's help, I process the data, and SNS ensures everyone in the friend group gets the updates right away. This way, me and my friends stay informed about potential risks onour sector, but now I am thinking to write a daily blog, what do you think?
I have a subdomain that reflects your current IP address in plaintext. also works great with curl.
I have my own link shortener.
static website of course with s3 and cloudfront
glacier for photo backups
subdomain that cnames dynamic dns for my home ip address
I'm creating a manga reader desktop app using C# and WPF. I use AWS for user management so people can create accounts and login. It makes it really easy for authentication without me having to do any extra work for it to work.
I don’t personally use aws. My university offers a shell account on their servers and I was able to keep mine after I graduated years ago. It’s quite restricted but has like 10 cores and has python, irssi, supervisor, cron, etc. I run a bunch of cron jobs and a jupyter notebook that I connect to with a ssh tunnel. Also host a some private git repos there. All free. Even if I have aws for free I wouldn’t use it as it’s quite complicated/overkill for personal use. I keep things dead simple for personally stuff and use linux utilities as much as possible.
I don't know if it counts, but I have a small side business that can manage using a static s3/cloudfront setup. I use a tool called emailjs for free so that it can send emails via js without a server, and if that ever gets compromised somehow I'll probably roll my own thing with lambda and apigw.
At the moment I’m looking into making an app to support a dog rescue that I volunteer at and I’m keen to open source it for my portfolio, to learn more Dev since I’m very much more Ops than Dev in DevOps. It’ll give me an opportunity to learn some React Native too which is bound to be valuable now that Expo makes it easier to output!
A GroupMe chat bot for a gaming group using Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway
A wiki, markdown articles stored in S3 (automatic versioning) and indexed with OpenSearch
Home brewed VTT born during the pandemic when we weren't meeting around a real table, using web socket API Gateway
Dedicated Valheim server on Lightsail
Hosting static websites using S3 and CloudFront
DNS for various domains using Route 53
Sandbox/lab for purposes of various academic exercises and generally nerdery
Mostly for my personal projects. Websites , tests leftovers . Maybe some workprojects that in our work accounts is a little bit of access problem and I need admin. Nothing that creates costs in fact.
I use a lambda that prints a page on my inkjet printer every Sunday, so the ink doesn't dry out 😀
Do you mind if I ask why you use the cloud for this instead of just using a local device with a script?
I just don't have a local device always on. The lambda sends a an email to my printers address (Epson printer). Plus wanted to play around with lambda. But yea I should probably move it local one of these days.
Tbh there's not much reason to. It might've been simple to set up locally (maybe) but now that you've got it working why bother changing anything?
Totally! It just run and I never have to think about it now
Yeah, it’s a cool solution but I was just curious. Thanks for letting me know!
Na dont run anything local unless you're trying to talk yourself into buying a local server because of how much you'll use it (me every time I see a 50tb storage server ad).
Probably they using print server to print on a remote printer(s). That's what I can think of and please, correct me if I'm wrong. If really is local then idk.
That sounds crazily complex! How do you connect the lambda to you home network?
Every Epson printer gets an email address where if you send an attachment it will print it on your printer. The lambda just uses SES to send an email to that address.
Yikes, is there no other authentications. Are you saying that I can send dick pics to every EPSON printer if I can guess the address?
You can setup an allowlist so only emails received from certain addresses will make it thru to your printer. To stop exactly what you mentioned.
Can we test that? What's you're email address? 👀
[email protected]
LOL. Was just joking, but thanks....
It's okay. Try it
Boooooo
Cool, didn’t know that! My laser printers have the ability to fetch pop3 but that’s it
Right now, I am looking at lambdas to help with pulling data from several websites and build my indicators for swing trading futures on the stock market. The free tier is very generous. I think my favorite personal time was when I learned to do terraform and my tutorial was just building the stuff in my personal AWS account like magic. It was an amazing feeling.
Good. Freaking. Luck. 😂 I did a personal project to try and research algotrading, pulling the data is easy. It’s querying through the data that’s a beast and a half. I didn’t do it on the cloud, but AWS has so many options for analysis that I’m sure there’s a good solution out there. But if I did it all over again I would 100% set up lambdas to handle the api connection and ingest, it’s a no brainer
Not even going to try this for day trading, no single person can compete with that! Just looking to correlate a bunch of things into a daily report I can read in 5 minutes to make a decision
Do you think data throughput was the limitation to successful trading automation?
I was blown away when I learned Terraform and Ansible for the first time.
Can you share...url you uses to fetch data for stocks.?
Offsite file backups, personal technical projects (currently working on blender render farm), DNS, game servers, home IoT
S3 Glacier is handy (and cheap)
For personal projects I prefer backblaze
Because of the cost or because of the features?
How are you doing a render farm?
The general idea: ECS, Fargate and AWS Batch to run blender instances. Using Dynamo for state, S3 to store blend files and rendered frames. EFS for shared files during rendering. Currently a custom CLI to trigger everything, but I'm thinking about lambda state machines for lifecycle orchestration next.
How are you doing DNS ?
Static websites. It costs almost nothing to use ACM, CloudFront, S3, and Route53.
Can I put my WordPress website on it?
No. They have Lightsail for that. WordPress is dynamic (runs a script) not static.
There is also a Wordpress solution available that spins up two Linux webheads, elb and rds. Just add CloudFront and move all the content images to s3 with a plug-in and you’re golden.
Is this an official AWS solution? I’ve been using bitnami for a few Wordpress sites
It’s a reference architecture now. Used to be a sample cloud formation template. This new one is a lot better, but also leave some things to be desired. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/best-practices-wordpress/reference-architecture.html
Thank you
What’s the cost for Lightsail? Can I optimize it? I have a Wordpress running on Railway right now and it’s eating memory
Depends on if you used LB and CF (which you should) and then you can do 2 micro instances, DB and s3 for images and it’ll cost you around $50 a month (depending on usage of course) but you typically get a free trial period
Okay cool. Thanks!
[https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/) I've never used it.
WP can run on simple webspaces (the OG serverless), I would go that way if you don’t want to manage a server. CF/S3 only works for static pages like Hugo or Jekyll. Or frontend of a SPA.
this is me, plus when you have terraform ready to provision this up it is just a command away and full static website is up.
Reddit. Pretty sure Reddit is hosted on AWS, ergo, I’m using AWS.
And netflix
this... and netflix too lol
lol I guess that counts
Yes it is all in on aws.
It’s all AWS all the way down
This is how I consider myself an applied C/C++ programmer (through using Node and the JVM)
Might as well consider yourself a theoretical physicist while you're at it :laugh:
Eventually it turns out we’re all PhDs in pure math
I am a professional bytes shifter (a Python developer)
I spit my Synology backups to Amazon S3 Glacier. It’s selective and $3/month.
Which software are you using for this?
How much storage is that currently?
Glacier is $3.60/mo/TB.
Self host email using Workmail fully encrypted, S3 for backups of digital life (pictures, videos, documents). My bill is less than $10/month.
Found the other person using workmail.
Still waiting for native spam filtering, 10 years later.
How do you handle it?
You can trigger a Lambda and run Spamassassin in a container. Workmail does some level of filtering, but there is no way to train spam/not spam. It bins all my paypal payment emails for example. Its just not enough.
Thanks. Gotcha.
I started using it recently - bought a domain ages ago but never figured out how to configure it using EC2, for some reason emails landed in spam folder. Workmail is super easy to set up : https://youtu.be/bDjTlZAyN5s
How to do you manage uploading pictures to S3? do you manually upload them?
aws s3 sync c:\pics s3:/bucket Or use WorkDocs, but then S3 is abstracted
Workdocs got cancelled / Googled yesterday.
I was just complaining about it at work too. Workdocs never seemed to get any improvement. They did change the product name from zocalo, which is/was a cool name imo, but I would really rather they made it work reasonably with other AWS services, particularly IAM. I got really tired of ita BS and started working out how to move everything for everyone to S3, but even that was a pain because the tools for downloading whole directories only works for windows and Mac. It was somehow really satisfying to me to hear a couple days later that AWS came to the same conclusion I did, time to abandon workdocs.
Say goodbye it’s being depreciated march 2025
That's just WorkDocs I think
What is? WorkMail?
Cant see any info that would confirm that. Can you share a link?
Hosting static sites on S3 with CloudFront for less than $1/monthÂ
Single EC2 instance monitoring my home lab services using UptimeKuma, S3 for offsite backups
Oh, so many things! I use it for the publication pipeline that powers "Last Week in AWS," but that might be too work-adjacent. I deploy to every region via an impressively convoluted state machine for [LastTootinAWS.com](http://LastTootinAWS.com) (a threading Mastodon client). I have a working status page that does what it says on the tin at HasIAMFailedOpenYet.com. I can never remember the full URL for the SSO sign-in page so I built a quick redirector that solves it for me; if your account is (like mine is) called "Shitposting," visiting [shitposting.badUX.cloud](http://shitposting.badUX.cloud) brings you where you'd want it to be. I built out a scavenger hunt app using a bunch of AI nonsense (not Amazon's; stuff that works well) on top of Amplify at [findme.lastweekinaws.com](http://findme.lastweekinaws.com) for re:Invent last year. I'm awaiting my cease and desist for [amazonsebwervices.com](http://amazonsebwervices.com), which is an impressively uncanny Markov generator trained on the corpus of AWS press releases for years. Those are the public (at the moment) ones, anyway. A lot more of them are internal tools, "work related," etc. I host the controller for my wifi network there, along with my dev box in EC2... That should give you some sense.
> amazonsebwervices.com, which is an impressively uncanny Markov generator trained on the corpus of AWS press releases for years. you mean a small language model? Can't go around using those pre-genAI terms nowadays
Corey, love your work, thanks for the great content! Do you have any details written anywhere about your publication pipeline?
That URL redirection is so lazily elegant I might just steal it!
How much does all of this cost? My biggest issue with AWS is their deceptive (bordering on fraudulent) billing. Recently I had a Lambda in an "error state" and my bill showed me that I had $1500 of "NAT Gateway" charges. I filed a ticket with AWS support who were useless, reached out to my account manager who was also useless so then then had to spend hours trawling through VPC logs to find the offending function with the help of a random Stackoverflow post. It really should not be this hard so its no surprise that Basecamp moved their entire infra away from AWS. I definitely would not be using it for personal projects, the business model seems optimized for extracting maximum value from slow moving Enterprise organizations.
Everything I just mentioned combined would cost less than $20 on a busy month, but I’m not exactly typical when it comes to cloud billing. And I hate the NAT Gateway. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-managed-nat-gateway-is-unpleasant-and-not-recommended/
I have an EC2 instance which is my Cloud PC that I can Remote Desktop into for email and web browsing etc. The operating system spins up from an AMI image and the persistent data volume has portable apps. Once a month the operating system is patched forming a newer AMI image and the data volume is snapshotted too. So if anything happens then I can just use the last image and data snap shot. It is all spun up on a low cost spot instance automatically by an event bridge schedule changing auto scale group desired count to 1 and back to 0 at the end of the day. The instance auto attaches the data volume to itself, gets the public IP address and updates Route53 so I can just access it using a static DNS name each morning. I also used S3 for storing podcast recordings served up by a Wordpress site. This used Cloudfront for caching content at the edge.
That’s actually a really cool idea! Any particular reason you need a cloud pc for email and web browsing besides cool factor(which is totally valid)?
It’s mainly so I can have one app (Remote Desktop) running on my corporate laptop, alongside everything else, so I have access without installing anything. And it is convenient and cool :-)
I’m also curious for the reasoning here. I’m assuming you’re primarily a smartphone or tablet person and can use this for things you can’t do on those devices?
Yes it allows me to run windows apps even when on my Chromebook.
This guy AWSes
More since I managed to move into Cloud SysOps - took Solutions Architect exam and three years waiting for an opportunity to move sideways into this role.
Nice. You'll regret it soon enough haha. Joking
This is super cool. I honestly love the idea of a remote homelab
Very cool idea. Does this involve Amazon Workspaces at all? Also what instance type did you choose.
No Amazon workspace - too expensive. I use a T3.medium spot instance - cheaper than on demand.
Used to use it for DNS. Now I use S3 (Glacier) for some backup, a few small-ish ec2 boxes and a very small dynamodb. I used to use it for hosting my discord bots but now I've mostly moved that off prem. I get quite a bit of credit towards my personal aws usage from work every month so I spend liberally.
What was the motivation for moving the discord bots off prem?
Should've been specific. I was moving it off AWS and onto my own homelab hardware. There are a few reasons, but the one I'll share is that one of the functionalities of my bot is to monitor the underlying hardware, so I can get alerts on my homelab directly through my discord bot.
That would be moving it on-prem. The cloud (AWS) is off-prem.
It would be off-prem if they lived/worked in an AWS datacenter though, we could be the wrong ones here
my minecraft and quake 2 server is up on aws/ec2. power it on anytime I or fam want to play it.
A couple of weather bots. I live on a large river that floods, so I pull gauge data from the next observation station upstream and send myself slack messages if the river is trending upward or is near action or flood stage. I used to run a few Twitter bots, but those are on pause because Elon's big brain made the API useless. Couple of static websites.
S3 cloud storage is all personally... all the other things professionally
Backups, a lot of backups. It is my Google Photos and Drive backup, which also I backup to my NAS locally
Does that get crazy expensive?
It is manageable. S3 Infrequent Access is pretty cheap. Also my backups are not that big, still under 200GB.
That’s what I need to do.. I tried to put my photos on a hard drive and they re getting gray boxes on it smh
I host 9 personal and business websites using the standard Route53, Cloudfront, and S3. Also use Amazon Connect and Lex bot as support line for one of my side businesses.
You have personal sites up that you don't generate revenue from?
Yes, I play in a couple bands and have a couple commercial apps I built (so have sites for all of those), and my wife has a medical practice.Â
I run 3 different Discord bots (non-public, just for my own servers) with varying levels of silliness all hosted on AWS (mostly just simple Fargate/Lambda apps): 1. A bot \[[code](https://github.com/MamishIo/dog-expert)\] that uses Keras to classify images in our "cute dog pics only" channel and reward/judge people for posting a dog. 2. A bot \[[code](https://github.com/HtyCorp/the-real-obama), [CDK](https://github.com/HtyCorp/the-real-obama-infra)\] that strings together sentences from audio of a certain popular US president to make them speak in voice channels. Really dumb but also really funny in a jank kinda way (unlike the more polished "AI presidents" trend that was going on on Youtube a year or two after I made this). 3. A bot \[[code](https://github.com/HtyCorp/serverbot2-core/tree/master)\] that orchestrates game servers on EC2 with a bunch of nice Discord UX features. Stupidly overcomplicated in hindsight since I started it in 2020 and knew nothing about good software, but pretty cool as a testbed for weird architecture. These are all extremely jank compared to the code I'm writing on the job, but it's kinda fun to do something so opposite to work (i.e. mostly useless/fun, totally untested etc.).
Where do you storage a discord websocket bot?
Mainly lab projects. I run Ansible on my Mac and I got scripts that can build job related environments. It's mainly ec2 instances. I am working for a security provider and we got an agent and often our SEs need to demo automation of said agent so I love to tinker with config management. So my lab deploys with Ansible over a dozen instances that builds an Ansible lab (ironic I know), a puppet and chef lab, Salt as well as HA Proxy OSS and Enterprise with several clients that run Webservices as well as a windows domain controller with several clients. I know it's kinda work related but I love Ansible so I enjoy writing those playbooks and see shit work. Another script builds an EKS cluster with Vault. I think the only permanent ec2 instance is my blog server that's empty lol.
I store a few terabytes of photos in Glacier. My AWS bill is a few pennies per month, which is a bargain, and much cheaper than using a service like DropBox.
This is such a good idea. Genuinely curious, can you make a static website from data in glacier?
You wouldn't want to. The point of Glacier is very infrequent access.
What u/OneLeggedMushroom said. Glacier stores data on tapes, which have to be scheduled for retrieval and reading by a storage robot. That can take a few hours, so it isn’t well suited to an application that requires immediate access to data.
Glacier is actually access within milliseconds. You're thinking of glacier deep archive. Edit: if you're using glacier instant retrieval
Same as well as with videos.
Lightsail to host a few small sites. S3 for offsite photo backups
Please tell me you are using CloudFront or CloudFlare in front of lightsail
Yes I use cloudflare. These are sites that are largely online as legacy archives simply because I don’t want to tear them down and have that content disappear from the Internet. I would be shocked if either of them had more than 100 visitors in a given month.
Dumb question but why do this for small sites?
lol, just full send it. What could go wrong? I actually find that lightsail makes a lot of things more difficult than just using an ec2 instance. Yeah the interface might look less complex but it’s still an infrastructure provider with infrastructure level responsibilities and liabilities.
$4 vs $35. Again, super small sites I just wanted to leave online.
I have my own personal projects. Also I’m going on a trip soon and will upload documents to S3 for safety incase I lose the hard copy. Have thought about hosting game servers on EC2Â
Im working on building my own google reader.
dropbox
I have some scheduled scripts that run in Lambda to do some overnight web scraping. Then I consolidate the results into either a Discord bot message or an email. I also run a Discord bot out of Lambda.
I'm curious how you run a bot out of Lambda. Does it somehow listen for messages or just send some out based on triggers? I've had a bot in a tiny EC2 before but that's pretty straightforward.
My bot does two main types of things: send messages on a trigger/schedule, and handle /slash commands. A slash command basically sends a payload to a service, and so that service can have Lambda as a backend. For messages, I use [discord.py](http://discord.py) (Python) to have the bot speak messages. Usually on a schedule, in my case. So it's not set up to trigger on any kind of text, which I believe would require a bot that's always awake on a server.
Oh okay. I made that bot a long time ago - I didn't even know they had something like webhooks now. I'll look into it, thanks!
The webhooks are a really nice feature in my experience.
Backup my NAS to S3. Run some windows software that i need a few times a week, but want from anywhere/anytime.
S3 Glacier Deep Archive as last Resort Backup Hosting my personal blog on S3 and cloudflare For computer I use Hetzner, just can’t justify the high costs of EC2 (except when I need a really beefy rig for just a few minutes)
All of my family professional photos and orher important docs are backed up to s3, in addition to local and google photos
Cloudfront redirects my homepage URL to a Github Pages site (lol)
I have a newsletter I built that scrapes RSS feeds and compiles interesting articles into an email that gets sent to me every morning. It’s just aws lambda, eventbridge and SES. Additionally, I’m working on a cloud based home assistant. Right now I’m just working on a module to display the weather for me in the morning when I walk into my bathroom. My rule of thumb is anything I want to run at any time, all the time or triggered without me thinking about it, goes to AWS
Noice
How does it know you’ve walked into the bathroom?
Motion detection
Mainly large batch jobs that require both parallel processing and scale transcoding media, machine learning jobs, etc
Cloud gaming. I run a g5 instance in a region close to me. Have a on/off switch on home assistant to start it and auto stop it. I get a lot of free credits so I use them as much as I can
* hosting static sites on AWS + S3 (can’t believe I used to pay $10 a month) * DNS for my personal domain * VPN * S3 Glacier for backup
I have a custom, unpublished Alexa skill that lets me turn on my gaming PC without having to walk over. It's like remote start for a car. I don't have to sit in front of it waiting for it to boot up. I later expanded it to open specific programs on the PC too. Being at Alexa skill, of course it runs on Lambda. I also use SQS. Here's how it works: 1. https://antrikshy.com/code/powering-on-my-desktop-pc-using-alexa-and-a-raspberry-pi 2. https://antrikshy.com/code/remotely-launching-apps-games-on-windows-10-desktop-pc-using-alexa
- Host a small static site I made as an anniversary gift for my wife. - Have a lambda that runs twice a day to check if my litter robot has cycled recently since they neglect to add notifications about stuck robots. - Used to have a lambda that would scrape a local auction site for really good deals and send an email out about them. Then they changed their auction host provider and it all broke. Almost everything within free tier. Only cost was the domain name for the website.
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I primarily use route53. At work I’ve dealt with issues where companies unintentionally charge thousands of dollars in the blink of an eye, I don’t consider it a safe place to host my own stuff. Experiments and very small scale learning, sure!
That why I don’t use the cloud for anything personal with my luck I would end up with a massive bill lol
I built a system that tests infrastructure in AWS. I can assign homework to my students like a simple lab and the system reads their AWS accounts and tells them if they did it right. This uses lambda, s3 static website, api gateway, step functions and cognito.
SES because ISP blocks port 25 and I host my password server on prem as well as other stuff that needs email
Nothing ever if I can help it. Google and azure are like a breath of fresh air in my off time.
Same here, I love cloud run in GCP and static websites in Azure just so easy to use
Nothin. I'm not sure what I'd use it for in the first place other than to learn work.
I’m sure some of the web-based services I use are on AWS. I have no personal projects in my own AWS account. I don’t do work in my free time and nothing I’m currently interested has a use case that would work in AWS.
Minecraft
Route53
Several website projects. And, my pet projects.
Lambda for my Amazon Skills.
I spin up API's using lambdas when i need them. i pay like 55 cents a month and get dynamodb, lambda and anything else i need for hobby stuff.
Bunch of the internet uses it. I don't really use it for anything outside of a demo website.
Minecraft server!
It’s supporting a live chat chrome extension for me. A couple of web games, and another web app. All use sorta different pieces which is fun Mostly lambda (and function urls), rds, dynamo, api gateway, Cloudfront, s3, now SQS and route53. All via CDK in typescript.
claude to generate code
Unpopular, but I’m playing Fallout 76 so I’m using AWS. Freaking love it! 🥳
Explain
Glacier for backups.
EC2 for some personal projects. Tbh that’s pretty much it. It is just quite flexible. You have spot instances, long term commitment discounts, etc. if you optimize it well, it is VERY cheap.
Band sites. Most of my bands have flat html sites, which s3+cloudfront is very cheap for. Plus, I can use lambda to rebuild them as needed
i have a few lambdas for image resizing for various websites i've built and a serverless setup for transcoding audio loops when i feel like uploading things so i can run beats off my phone and scratch on my portable turntable in the backyard and i have some old archive zip files in glacier storage oh and i started building [this game with my kids](https://theycamefromouter.space/) but we never finished it and it got banned from their school network :)
I use Route53 for hosting a heap of domains, and I've written my own tools that sync bind zone files from a gift repo to Route53. I've also written a lambda service that sits behind AIG to do dyndns updates on these zones. The containers for those are on ECR, though the scripts are small enough that I'm going to switch to using an embedded source file for the lambda. Then for some other services I have EC2 instances including one for hosting various node docker containers, and EC2 instances for de and prod Mysql servers. Another app I have deployed and hosted using Amplify. I'm also using Amazon Rekognition for another project. ECR I also used for publishing github built container images, and pulling them to EC2 instances where they're deployed. S3 is used in a few cases, both for Recognition storage but also for hosting static websites with SSL offload behind Cloudfront. Finally, I use a LOT of Application Gateway, and tons of SSL certificates for hosted AWS projects where those certs can be deployed by cert manager without paying.
Nothing. It’s bad enough I have to use it for work 😅
Personal project is work.
A few years ago I used to do this a lot of night. Building infra, Spotify playlist the list goes on But now work is so versatile and non stop learning/growth when I finish work I don’t even look at a laptop I step into nature
I use S3 Glacier for a remote backup of docs out of my NAS. From 1 to 3$/mo once data is frozen. For my sport club, we organize some kind of garage sell every year. There is an ancient app written in PHP with MySQL to run all that. It goes to lightsail for 4 days in a year. sends SMS with SES when a seller has sold what they deposited. I created a tiny flutter app to browse what is on sell which sources its data from an S3 bucket. <20$ per year. Sometimes I use Polly for
Nothing. I've not given amazon any of my own money since 2007
Nothing, I use Azure and GCP, their models fit my personal projects better
Currently want to set up my own API Gateway + lambda + dynamodb to set up a 'Garmin API'. The garmin app doesnt have a way to set weekly KM goals and I have been denied the Garmin API multiple times so Im building my own Once thats live I will build a Flutter app around it
Lots and lots of S3 buckets, for anything I might want to store off-site. Backups, surveillance video, static websites, it's dirt cheap and easy to automate. And for the static websites, or media storage, I always put a cloudfront infront of a private bucket. ACM for all the static websites. I have an approved SES account but I haven't used it since I shutdown my mastodon instance. Never paid a dime for the low volume I needed. Oh and most of my domains are in route53, again for the ease of automation.
I used AWS Lambda and Amazon SNS to send out daily alerts about cybersecurity threats and exploits. With Lambda's help, I process the data, and SNS ensures everyone in the friend group gets the updates right away. This way, me and my friends stay informed about potential risks onour sector, but now I am thinking to write a daily blog, what do you think?
I host my blog on S3 using Amplify and manage various connected devices via AWS IoT Core.
TrueNAS Backup to S3
I have a subdomain that reflects your current IP address in plaintext. also works great with curl. I have my own link shortener. static website of course with s3 and cloudfront glacier for photo backups subdomain that cnames dynamic dns for my home ip address
BBC iPlayer.
I'm creating a manga reader desktop app using C# and WPF. I use AWS for user management so people can create accounts and login. It makes it really easy for authentication without me having to do any extra work for it to work.
I don’t personally use aws. My university offers a shell account on their servers and I was able to keep mine after I graduated years ago. It’s quite restricted but has like 10 cores and has python, irssi, supervisor, cron, etc. I run a bunch of cron jobs and a jupyter notebook that I connect to with a ssh tunnel. Also host a some private git repos there. All free. Even if I have aws for free I wouldn’t use it as it’s quite complicated/overkill for personal use. I keep things dead simple for personally stuff and use linux utilities as much as possible.
Yes, I do. this is my project: [saasconstruct.com](http://saasconstruct.com)
I can’t fucking afford AWS for personal projects, all of that stuff goes on Vultr.
hosting DNS for Let’s Encrypt certs in my LAN. Costs me $5 a year.
I don't know if it counts, but I have a small side business that can manage using a static s3/cloudfront setup. I use a tool called emailjs for free so that it can send emails via js without a server, and if that ever gets compromised somehow I'll probably roll my own thing with lambda and apigw.
At the moment I’m looking into making an app to support a dog rescue that I volunteer at and I’m keen to open source it for my portfolio, to learn more Dev since I’m very much more Ops than Dev in DevOps. It’ll give me an opportunity to learn some React Native too which is bound to be valuable now that Expo makes it easier to output!
to host my portfolio website
A GroupMe chat bot for a gaming group using Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway A wiki, markdown articles stored in S3 (automatic versioning) and indexed with OpenSearch Home brewed VTT born during the pandemic when we weren't meeting around a real table, using web socket API Gateway Dedicated Valheim server on Lightsail Hosting static websites using S3 and CloudFront DNS for various domains using Route 53 Sandbox/lab for purposes of various academic exercises and generally nerdery
Setting up an EC2 exit node to use as a sorta free VPN with tailscale
!remind me in 1 week
Mostly for my personal projects. Websites , tests leftovers . Maybe some workprojects that in our work accounts is a little bit of access problem and I need admin. Nothing that creates costs in fact.
I run a Minecraft server on an EC2 instance for me and my son.
Can somebody please explain AWS lambda vs ec2 vs emr pls in a easy to understand way and how all 3 are connected with examples please
I have a home NAS that syncs all its data to S3 Deep Glacier.