Free, fast and scalable side projects on AWS
When building out new side projects it’s often fun to work with hosting platforms like Heroku or Now. The downside is that when it comes to scale your application when all those new users show up, you may be stuck with big bills or solutions that don’t meet security standards.
We run the cloudcosts.io infrastructure on the AWS free tier. This gives us the flexibility of having almost zero infrastructure costs monthly, the ability to adopt industry standard security practices and be able to scale up at a moments notice. We don’t have to worry about a successful side project outgrowing the hosting platform. In this post I want to share some of the cost effective solutions for running your project.
1. Email using SES
SES is one of the cheapest and most reliable email platforms that can handle inbound and outbound emails. You don’t need to pay for GSuite or Sendgrid. Send application emails, business emails and receive support requests through SES. This will minimize your costs and also significantly simplify your infrastructure.
SES can handle forwarding emails by wiring up a lambda function which forwards an email upon receiving a message. You can also send emails from your own personal Gmail account through SES. This will make sure that your support requests hide your personal email. The guides below cover everything that you need to set this up.
Guides:
- Email forwarding module: https://github.com/ColDog/ses-email-forwarder
- SES sending email: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/sending-email.html
- Using Gmail: http://www.daniloaz.com/en/use-gmail-with-your-own-domain-for-free-thanks-to-amazon-ses-lambda/
2. Free tier sql databases
One of the best offerings on AWS is the free tier RDS (Relational Database Service). With a new AWS account, you will receive a free (micro sized) database instance for up to a year. This is perfect for your side project and can keep costs low. And if the day comes where need to scale this database up, you are running on one of the most reliable platforms for managing SQL databases.
One tip here — if you want to run multiple side projects — use a single micro database instance and simply create a different schema inside the database. This can stretch costs out significantly.
3. CloudFront CDN
The CloudFront CDN has a very generous free tier that you are unlikely to hit for a small side project. The big advantage with CloudFront is that you can easily add a secure and fast serving layer in front of your application. If you add AWS Certificate Manager, you’ll have SSL in front of your application for free and the certificates will renew automatically!
Guides:
- CloudFront static site hosting: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/cloudfront-serve-static-website/
4. Elastic Container Service
The ECS product is probably one of the more complex products on this list. It handles a lot of functions on AWS and is tricky to wrap your head around. The main selling point for your side project is that you can store docker containers and run a simple dockerized application for free. You just need to pick an underlying EC2 instance that is on the free tier.
This may feel like overhead compared to your simple Heroku stack, but it’s worth it in the long run. Building a dockerized version of your application will keep your application in a maintainable state in the long run and allow you to scale up with ECS.
The best way to get started with ECS is to run through the ‘first time’ guide. Check out some of the guides and documentation as well below which can help you out.
Guides:
- Getting started with ECS: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/amazon-ecs-terms-and-architecture-807d8c4960fd
- A simple ECS deploy script: https://gist.github.com/ColDog/aa967716e8694fd34506edf258b107aa
