Cloud
26 guides tagged “Cloud”.
- Egress vs Ingress Bandwidth: What's the Difference? Ingress is data coming in and is usually free; egress is data going out and is billed. Direction, not volume, is what shows up on the invoice.
- How Many vCPUs Does My App Actually Need? Size from the process model and measured CPU time. A single-process web app often needs one or two vCPUs; the database needs headroom and fast disk.
- vCPU vs Core: What's the Difference? A core is physical; a vCPU is a scheduling unit the hypervisor exposes, often one hyperthread. The mapping depends on the instance family.
- What Is a Secrets Manager (and Do You Need One)? A secrets manager stores, controls, audits, and can issue short-lived credentials. It earns its cost once several services or people need a secret.
- What Is SPIFFE and SPIRE? SPIFFE is an identity standard for workloads; SPIRE is its reference implementation. Together they replace shared secrets with attested certificates.
- What Is Workload Identity? Workload identity gives a process a short-lived credential based on what it is, not a static secret it carries. It removes the key from the deploy path.
- Find the Money in Your Cloud Bill A beginner journey: read an itemised bill, find idle resources, right-size the workload, fix egress, and verify the saving against the next invoice.
- How to Deploy Your First App on AWS for Free Deploy a web app on AWS for $0: Free plan account, budget alert, S3 + CloudFront frontend, Lambda + DynamoDB backend, all inside always-free limits.
- How to Deploy Your First App on Azure for Free Deploy a web app on Azure for $0: the free account's $200 credit, Azure Functions, Static Web Apps, Cosmos DB, and always-free limits that keep it free.
- How to Deploy Your First App on Cloudflare for Free Deploy an app on Cloudflare for $0: Workers (100K req/day), Pages static hosting, D1 database, R2 storage — with zero egress fees and no credit card.
- How to Deploy Your First App on Google Cloud for Free Deploy a web app on Google Cloud for $0: Cloud Run with scale-to-zero, Firestore for data, and the always-free tier limits that keep the bill at zero.
- How to Deploy Your First App on Oracle Cloud for Free Deploy an app on Oracle Cloud for $0: Ampere A1 ARM VM (2 OCPU/12 GB), 200 GB block storage, Autonomous DB, and the idle-reclamation trap.
- How to Launch Free Infrastructure on AWS, GCP, or Azure Run a web app on AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, or Cloudflare for $0: free tiers, lean stacks, and real monthly costs from $0 to $300+.
- Alibaba Cloud vs Tencent Cloud: The Asian Hyperscalers Compared The two clouds that dominate Asia are nearly invisible in Western coverage. Alibaba Cloud (#1 in China, ~33-39% share) vs Tencent Cloud (~10-15%). Real 2026 pricing, regions, real-name verification, and the ICP filing catch.
- Contabo Review: The Cheapest Cloud VPS on the Internet — Worth the Risk? Contabo sells 8 vCPU, 24GB RAM for ~€14/month — half of what Hetzner charges. But shared CPU, capped port speeds, and a polarizing support reputation. Full review with real 2026 pricing, risks, and who should use it.
- Ultra-Budget Cloud Providers Compared: Contabo, UpCloud, Kamatera, IONOS Hetzner and DigitalOcean are too expensive? The next tier down: Contabo (most hardware per dollar), UpCloud (zero-cost egress), Kamatera (build-your-own), IONOS ($2 promos). Real 2026 pricing, billing traps, and who each one is for.
- What Is ICP Filing (and Why Do China's Cloud Hosts Require It)? ICP Filing (ICP备案) is a mandatory government registration for any website or app hosted on mainland China servers. What it costs (nothing), how long it takes (~20 business days), and what happens if you skip it (your site gets blocked).
- AWS, GCP, and Azure for Vibecoders: The Services You Actually Need Your AI generates Terraform for AWS, Dockerfiles for Cloud Run, and ARM templates for Azure. Learn which 20 services matter, what they actually do, and the common AI-generated mistakes for each cloud. Side-by-side service maps for all three hyperscalers.
- Budget Cloud and PaaS Compared: Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Railway, Fly.io, Render, Vercel, Netlify Don't pay hyperscaler prices for a side project. Compare every budget VPS and PaaS: Hetzner (cheapest), Railway (easiest), Fly.io (global), Render (reliable), Vercel (Next.js), DigitalOcean (balanced), Netlify (static). Real August 2026 pricing, hidden costs, and when each one wins.
- How to Choose a Cloud Provider for Your AI-Generated App Your AI writes the app. The cloud runs it. Compare every major provider — Big 3, PaaS, and budget VPS — by cost, complexity, and use case. Decision guide for vibecoders deploying AI-generated apps.
- What Is a vCPU (and Why Isn't It a Real Core)? A vCPU is a slice of a physical core shared with other customers. Learn about oversubscription, steal time, and burstable instances before you size anything.
- ARM vs x86: Why Your Laptop, Your Server, and Your Cloud Disagree Apple Silicon, AWS Graviton, and Ampere made ARM servers real. Learn what changes when your binary no longer matches your host, and when ARM saves money.
- Which APAC Cloud Region Should You Deploy To? Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Sydney: how to choose an APAC region by latency, connectivity, compliance, and cost rather than by map distance.
- Why Is My Kubernetes Bill So High (and How Do I Cut It)? Most Kubernetes cost comes from control planes, idle nodes, and per-service load balancers rather than compute. Learn the line items and how to cut them.
- What Is Egress Bandwidth (and Why It Shows Up on the Bill)? Cloud providers meter traffic leaving their network far more strictly than traffic entering it. Egress is the line item that turns a free app into a monthly bill.
- How to Choose a VPS Size for an AI-Built App Start small, measure the right three numbers, and resize on evidence. A practical sizing procedure for the machine that runs your AI-generated app.