Some might have already a preference towards one cloud provider over another (based on their experience or other factors), but here I’m trying to compare them from a pure “free cloud provider credits for a bootstrapped startup” perspective,

Summary

Yes, let me start from the end :-).

Note: Prices are in USD

And now let’s dive into each one of the cloud providers and what they offer for bootstrapped startups

GCP – Google for Startups

Looks like GCP wasn’t offering any free credits to bootstrapped startups but the good news is that from 2022 (not sure about the actual date) they are!

New in 2022: Calling all bootstrapped startups! We know that at the earliest stages, just getting started can feel like the biggest challenge. Self-funded startups can now receive up to $2,000 USD in Cloud credits to use over two years to help build and grow your company from the ground up on Google Cloud.

Requirements:

• Founded within 10 years of applying to the program
• Have a publicly available company website and a unique company email domain.
  • Psst!
    • Need a new domain? Try Namecheap
    • Have a domain, but want an email for free? How to set up Zoho Mail with your own domain
• A valid Google Cloud Billing Account ID (e.g. 18-digit alphanumeric hex string like ABC123-DEF456-GHI789) linked to the domain and company email on your application

You are NOT eligible if:

• Already enrolled in the Google For Startups Cloud Program or have received in excess of $4k Google Cloud credits
• A company who has IPOd or been acquired
• An educational institution, government entity, nonprofit, personal blog, dev shop, consultancy, or agency
• A cryptocurrency mining company, or a company distributing tokens contrary to regulatory guidance in your jurisdiction. For example, companies issuing tokens solely for speculative purposes will not be considered

References:

• https://cloud.google.com/startup
• https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/startup/dl-cd.html

AWS – Activate Founders

While AWS Activate has 2 Tiers. Activate Founders is the one for bootstrapped startups

Requirements

• New to AWS Activate Founders
• Have not previously received credits from AWS Activate Portfolio
• Have an active AWS Account
• Startup must be self-funded, unbacked or bootstrapped – no institutional funding or affiliation with an Activate Provider
• A company website or web profile
• Startup must be less than 10 years old

References

• https://aws.amazon.com/activate/
• https://aws.amazon.com/activate/faq/

Azure – Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub

There are a few tiers in Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub and each comes with its own free credits budget.

A few more benefits that Microsoft offers:

• up to 20 seats for one year’s subscription to GitHub Enterprise
• access to $1,000 of credits, three free months of an OpenAI API Innovation License and free consultation with an OpenAI expert

Interesting that in their FAQ, they are describing 5 states of a startup. As I read it, you can start applying from the Prototyping state (for an Ideate stage tier) to the Established Market (for a Scale stage tier)

Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub is designed to grow with you. When you complete your application, please choose the stage that best describes your startup’s current state. As you continue to develop and expand your company in the future, you will be able to unlock more benefits and features.

Concept design
You are at the very beginning of your startup journey and are refining your idea and validating your solution by talking to potential users and industry experts. There’s a good chance your idea evolves as you speak to more people, which is completely expected.

Prototyping
You have already gone through some idea validation and are now beginning to build either a wireframe or a prototype to continue user testing. You still may not be certain about moving forward with your product at this stage, and that’s OK!

Building MVP
You know your solution has value and you are jumping into developing a minimally viable product (MVP). Your MVP should be more advanced than your prototype and have enough features planned to make it a functioning solution for potential customers.

MVP in market
You have already launched your MVP product and are focusing on shipping features and winning customers. You should choose this stage if you have developed your product beyond an MVP, but you are still working on acquiring paying customers.

Established market
You have a mature product in the market and have traction in the form of paying customers. If you choose this stage, you should feel you have achieved product market fit and are ready to focus on scaling your company.

Requirements

• You must be engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core piece of your current or intended business – this software must be owned, not licensed.
• Your headquarters must reside in the countries covered by our Azure global infrastructure.
• Your startup must be privately held.
• Your startup must be a for-profit business.
• Have a LinkedIn profile

You are NOT eligible if:

• Your Startup has already received more than a total of $10,000 in free Azure.
• Your startup has gone through a Series D or later funding round.
• Your startup is an educational institution, government entity, personal blog, dev shop, consultancy, agency, bitcoin or cryptomining company.

Resources

• http://startups.microsoft.com/
• https://startups.microsoft.com/blog/founders-hub-benefits/

P.S.

There are more cloud providers than these GCP, AWS and Azure that I’ve touched on here. At some stage, I might extend the comparison to other providers.

The next step would also probably be applying to each one of them with an idea and seeing if any would actually accept it.

We may earn a referral fee for some of the services we recommend on this post/website at no cost to you.

The post Choosing a Cloud Provider for a Bootstrapped StartUp appeared first on ISbyR.

Psst! Need a new domain? Try Namecheap

Side Note: a while back I wrote about how to Use Gmail with your own domain for free. That method was utilising Mailgun and creating a free @gmail.com email and it is a bit more technical than some would want

Zoho Mail is part of Zoho Workplace suite and while there are paid plans for standalone email and Workplace, there is also a “Forever Free Plan” for email service only

Here is a brief comparisons of the plans, more details here.

Creating Zoho account

Browse to Zoho Mail Pricing page and choose the applicable plan.

If you are interested in the free one, then scroll down and select the “Forever Free Plan”

Fill in your details on the following page to create a Zoho account.

After the signup process is complete you can continue with setting up Zoho Mail account

Setting up Zoho Mail

Navigate to Zoho Mail Admin Console,

Create an Organization

Add a new Domain

Enter your domain name

Now to the “fun” part!

In order for Zoho to be able to Receive and Send email using your domain you will need to set DNS records with your hosting or your DNS provider. I must say that this process was very well guided an it has links to detailed guides based if you are with one of the major hosting/DNS providers. The screenshots in the next steps are from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) since I use it as my DNS provider.

Setting TXT DNS record to prove ownership of your domain

In GCP navigate to Networking > Network services > Cloud DNS and select your domain

Click ADD RECORD SET

Create the TXT record using TXT data copied from Zoho Mail.

Leave TXT name blank (I was trying it with @ but it didn’t work for me)

Set TTL for 3600 seconds

If everything was done correctly, when you click Verify TXT Record in Zoho mail wizard you will be able to proceed

Set the remaining required DNS records

Next setup MX Records

SPF record and another TXT record for DKIM.

Now you are it’s time to configure users and start sending emails!!

Configure Users and Aliases

In Zoho Mail Admin Console navigate to Users and click CREATE MAIL ACCOUNT for your user.

While you are there (or later) you can also setup Aliases for your User under Mail Settings > Email Alias

Sending and Receiving emails with your domain for free with Zoho Mail

Now you can send emails using any of the defined aliases

We may earn a referral fee for some of the services we recommend on this post/website.

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The Challenge

The part of daily commute when I can actually sit and work is about  30 minutes each way and goes through areas with quite a patchy network, so I had a ping -t 8.8.8.8  constantly running to understand whether the  delay that I am getting is from Cloud Shell or Console doing any actual work or from my connectivity to the network.

I kind of lied – I did not complete all of the labs on the bus/train.

I did the first lab “Creating a Virtual Machine” at home as I didn’t know the format of the labs and whether the QwikLabs estimated duration is precise.  I also did the “Hello Node Kubernetes” at home as the estimated time was 60 minutes and I am totally new to Kubernetes. The rest of them as well as the associated posts were actually done on the daily commute.

The Journey

The quest consist of 7 or 8 (if you want to do the first lab on once for Linux and once for Windows) labs

Each lab you start will create you a temporary GCP account that you can login with to the Cloud Console and Shell, where you will spend most of the time creating and using different GCP resources. It suggested by QwikLabs to run the labs in Incognito mode, and after a few that’s how my login screen looked like

The labs are very detailed and are easy to follow. I did have a few things I got stuck with. I am not sure whether I missed something in the instructions or the labs are not up-to-date.

I’ve decided to put my “workarounds” as a separate posts for my own sake as well as for the sake of others who might have similar experience

Also wanted to mention the guys at QwikLabs support. They are very responsive and nice. For some reason when I tried to start the last lab (Set Up Network and HTTP Load Balancers) it became non free and requested me for 7 credits. I’ve emailed them and teh support team sorted everything out pretty quickly.

The Bumps Along The Way

Creating a Virtual Machine – I got stuck on 10/15 points

Compute Engine: Qwik Start – Windows – just a few tips about choosing the right image for the VM as well as what to look for in the logs while you are waiting to be able to RDP to the machine

Creating a Persistent Disk – I decided to “extend” the lab a little bit by adding a file into the persistent disk, blowing away the machine, reattaching the disk to a new machine  and verifying the file is still there

Hello Node Kubernetes – explains how to get the token required  to access the Kubernetes Dashboard

The Finish Line

All the labs are complete and I can wear my “GCP Essentials” badge with honor!

The post Completing the GCP Essentials quest on my daily commute appeared first on ISbyR.

Start here after you’ve finished the “Creating a Persistent Disk” lab.

Let’s create a new folder on our  persistent disk. Run mkdir /mnt/mydisk   (while still SSH-ing to the VM)

Now add a file there with some text vi /mnt/mydisk/tmp/hello.txt

Press i  to switch to edit mode and type in some text (It was “Hi There!” in my case) then follow this sequence to save Esc : wq

It’s time to say goodbye to your VM and delete it.

In the Cloud Shell execute gcloud compute instances delete gcelab –zone=us-central1-c   and you will see something similar to the below

The following instances will be deleted. Any attached disks configured
 to be auto-deleted will be deleted unless they are attached to any
other instances or the `--keep-disks` flag is given and specifies them
 for keeping. Deleting a disk is irreversible and any data on the disk
 will be lost.
 - [gcelab] in [us-central1-c]

Do you want to continue (Y/n)?  y


Deleted [https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/qwiklabs-gcp-678cde46183b8e95/zones/us-central1-c/instances/gcelab].

You can also go to the Cloud Console and verify that your “old” VM is gone.

Create a new VM (using Cloud Console or Shell) with the  name of gcelab2

When it is ready use the following command (in the Cloud Shell) to attach the disk:

gcloud compute instances attach-disk gcelab2 –disk mydisk –zone us-central1-c

SSH to the VM

Execute the below commands (similar to the ones you did as part of attaching the persistent disk to gcelab VM) necessary to create  a new mount point and mount the disk. DON’T run the  format (mkfs) command

sudo mkdir /mnt/mydisk
sudo mount -o discard,defaults /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0Google_PersistentDisk_persisten
t-disk-1 /mnt/mydisk

You can run df -kh  to see the disk mounted and available

google245648_student@gcelab2:~$ df -kh
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           371M  7.5M  364M   2% /run
/dev/sda1       9.8G  983M  8.4G  11% /
tmpfs           1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdb        196G   61M  186G   1% /mnt/mydisk

Don’t forget to check your message from the old VM

google245648_student@gcelab2:~$ cat /mnt/mydisk/tmp/hello.txt 
Hi There!

The post Qwiklabs – GCP Essentials – Creating a Persistent Disk – Extending the lab appeared first on ISbyR.

The lab says to run the gcloud container clusters get-credentials command and then to start the proxy kubectl proxy –port 8081  after which you should be able to access the Kubernetes Dashboard UI at https://<YOUR_SPECIFIC_URL>.appspot.com/ui,

However, instead of getting the actual UI I was presented with a “Login” screen.

I am not sure whether I did something wrong or not, but you can overcome this by providing the Token.

In order to get the token open a new Cloud Shell tab and run the following command cat /home/google244648_student/.kube/config | grep access-token  (of course replace with your user’s home directory)

You will see an output similar to the below

access-token: ya29.GqMBbwUy_ilk0VFXi4pK4-MAC5q-psLmOlt31lhmjc5MkBC4PocfZW7x_-yQVuUcxezLTVwomuLPfxcI-7OVXhyf2hbxLS4IXjHxxsTV_kToVrTpSQpytM6ipPzfwtI4mU0L9G266oBnRLL5FPwb81YiU5P3gq98ViK4HIf-IVbD68WyRvUtBJrUPHTPqyddh7AG5ZUBi7pfRqKdr8PTiGgzfXIJNg

Copy the everything after “access-token: ” and paste it into the Kubernetes UI “Login” screen (don’t forget to select “Token” as the login method)

The post Qwiklabs – GCP Essentials – Hello Node Kubernetes – Getting the Kubernetes Dashboard Token appeared first on ISbyR.

When you need to choose the OS the lab says: “Choose Windows Server 2012 R2,..”, however you will not find such to be available.

What I had were:

So I’ve chosen the former.

When you start the VM you are advised  that it might take some time before the machine will be RDP-able and you need to run  gcloud compute instances get-serial-port-output instance-1  using Cloud Console and wait for the below output (which will indicate that now you can RDP to it)

2018/02/27 05:27:05 GCEInstanceSetup: ------------------------------------------------------------
2018/02/27 05:27:05 GCEInstanceSetup: Instance setup finished. instance-1 is ready to use. Activation will continue in the backgr
ound.
2018/02/27 05:27:05 GCEInstanceSetup: ------------------------------------------------------------

I’ve scanned the few last lines and couldn’t see it, I run the above command again a few more times (with additional parameter, that specifies to show only the delta from the previous output). but nothing changed. Then I decided to scroll all the way up and this message actually appeared almost in the few first lines of the output

The post Qwiklabs – GCP Essentials – Compute Engine Qwik Start – Windows Tips appeared first on ISbyR.

What I think went wrong is the step where you need to create the 2nd VM.  The lab says that you can choose any zone for the VM

Being in Sydney, I naturally created it in australia-southeast1-c using the following command from Google Cloud Shell gcloud compute instances create gcelab2 –zone australia-southeast1-c , but when followed all the steps till the end of the lab I noticed that my lab score was still only 10 out of 15.

I quickly deleted the improperly placed VM by running gcloud compute instances delete gcelab2  and re-created it in the suggested zone by running gcloud compute instances create gcelab2 –zone us-central1-c.

Great Success – 15 out of 15 points achieved!!!

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