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I have a few ideas for mobile applications, some of which could benefit from some cloud functionality.
For example, an application might allow a user to take photographs with their phone which would generate a list of thumbnails, imagine a to-do list which comprises photographs rather than the traditional text entries.
With the help of the cloud, the user could sync the thumbnails on multiple devices, or perhaps give access to the list to another person using a push notification to their phone, allowing them to then download the thumbnails. There may also be a cloud-based database being used.
It's a simple scenario but it raises some questions for me.
Most mobile apps are currently either free (maybe monetised with ads) or have an initial one-off cost, yet ongoing cloud services cost money. If I developed an app that had 1,000,000 users all storing photos in the cloud and they use the app for the next ten years then the cloud costs could be substantial yet income from app sales may be low after the initial influx of users.
So how do other developers manage ongoing cloud costs?
Are most apps that make use of the cloud subscription based?
Can someone who has already done this type of thing share their experience regarding cloud costs and app monetisation?
Cloud storage is pretty cheap so you could go the Apple way and allow free use up to a certain storage limit and then charge for extra space. Another way is to actually store images offline on a local server and then copy back as required. Since these images are only accessible via your app you can send a message to your online server when it looks like an image is about to be required - pre load from your local server and then delete again after some time period. You may need some extra management code but if you know how many devices are registered and whether they all have a copy of the image then there is no need for the image to be available online.
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I was checking Azure plans (specifically Service App) and didn't understand well their prices. I just want to upload a simple MVC .Net Core App (And create a SQL Database instance also in Azure) for a friend of mine.
This App it's just to manage his customers and products. Could someone tell me a final price in dollars?
Thanks!
The answer would not be straight forward with a single figure. It is all around the compute power and storage (vPU, RAM, etc.) so it depends how many hours you would need these resources. This pricing calculator is useful to give some indication, but not sufficient unfortunately (saying this by experience).
However you can easily calculate based on the the compute power and plans you think may be suitable that are given in the following links:
App Service
SQL
You should consider General Purpose and Serverless for SQL in order to reduce the cost. This off course has it's disadvantages which should be a different topic to discuss. Also, buying a one or more years up front saves cost!
Beware that prices do change.
There are several factors you need to specify before you can find the cost. Like Region, OS, Tier etc. You can use Azure Pricing Calculator. Just search for service app, fill the details and you will know the expected price.
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My team and I would like to develop a project that incorporates an Android, iOS and web app. Scalability and big throughput potential is a key feature. We have started to work with Parse.com, and it provides exactly what we're looking for - except for the prohibitive expensiveness of scaling and the absurd limits on queries and requests/second. What are some alternatives to Parse in this sense? We most likely do not need any complex database actions and limited cloud processing.
Thanks in advance.
Perhaps it's time us Parse users go to the big boy of cloud services: https://aws.amazon.com/mobile/
Parse is an outstanding option for getting up and running quickly. Don't underestimate the value in being able to rapidly bring an idea to market.
Long term, potential competitors to Parse (e.g. Firebase, PubNub) will not provide meaningful savings when operating at scale. If you are concerned about that you will want to look into developing your own backend services and running them on infrastructure like AWS (Amazon Web Services). At a high level, Parse uses MongoDB for its core database and is entirely hosted using AWS. AWS offers tons of services for managing data, performing computations, load balancing, and so on. They also offer AWS API Gateway which allows you to access AWS resources and automatically creates client SDKs for you.
As a general rule of thumb, it's much better to focus on building the best possible user experience than to focus too much on scalability. By and large, issues of scalability rarely come into play because most apps fail. Not saying that to be discouraging — just something to keep in mind and prevent you from falling into the trap of over-engineering at the cost of time :)
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I'd like to build an open source online learning platform on top of app engine, but there are a couple of challenges that make me doubt if it's even a good idea.
The reason I'd like to do it on app engine, is because it takes care of the hosting. Most open source learning platforms today require a LAMP stack, so someone in the school has to know how to upload the software via ftp, look up database login details, select a hosting provoder,...
The only problems on app engine I'm struggling with are
The process of setting up an app id is geared towards developers.
schools would still need to download the app engine sdk
Billing is done on raw resource usage, which is hard to translate into software feature usage.
For 1, it's easy enough to write up a guide, but if you have any ideas on how to make it easier, let me know.
Problem 2: The sdk, or if possible, only appcfg.py, could be included into some 'installer', which asks for your app id, and would set it up for you. This would also allow me to initialize the datastore.
But I'm really stuck on 3. It would be possible to estimate how much usage of a certain feature will cost, track the total usage of a feature and estimate the bill for the school that way, showing a breakdown of which features are costing them the most, but I don't know a good way to do this.
App Engine is for developers, period, end of discussion. Instead of giving each school it's own app id, as in myschool.appspot.com, what if instead you set up one central project at, say, myschoolthing.appspot.com, and that school would be at myschoolthing.appspot.com/school/myschool. You pay resource based fees to appengine, and schools pay you fees at whatever level you want. So if you want them to be billed by number of students, go ahead. Hours of use? Go ahead. Etc., etc., etc.
You can create an easy to use school sign up page, to replace confusing ad technical deployments.
This method does require you to pay app engine and set up a way to accept payments, but it is much closer to what you want.
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I'm trying to work out what hosting to get for a small pop up site to take registrations from an EDM campaign. We will send the emails out from mailchimp or similar, and then the site will need to show a couple of info pages and a registration form. Ill proccess the form with cakephp to save to the db and email the registrant.
The email will go out to around 10,000 recipients - so i guess worse case scenario is they all open it at once and click to go to the site, if unlikely.
Is VPS required for this, or will cloud hosting do it? How do people go about estimating that?
Is VPS required for this, or will cloud hosting do it?
In general cloud hosting means a VPS, and then some. Usually the difference is that cloud providers often provide other services (like maybe a CDN, robust APIs, etc) and provide on-demand usage-based billing. This sounds perfect for you since you can just spin up additional instances (if you have a proxy/load balancer) or resize your instances if you find yourself running out of CPU or RAM.
However, cloud services can be a bit ambiguous at times, so let me break it down further. If you are considering a VPS you probably want to go with a provider that gives you a "cloud" VPN where with on-demand (hourly) billing so you can add/resize your VPNs as needed. My current favorite is Rackspace Cloud Servers, but others (like Amazon EC2) are good too. The main reason I prefer Rackspace is that the instances aren't transient (all data is gone on reboot) like Amazon's, which can complicate system architecture.
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I'm going to deploy my application on one of them,
and have no idea which is better.
Amazon's Cloud services, at this time, are much more general and flexible, while Google App Engine essentially fits some specific classes of applications that can live within its specific limitations (those limitations are being gradually relaxed, as GAE adds features and allows you to pay to exceed certain quotas, but that does not mean GAE will become a completely general-purpose platform the way Amazon's services are).
If your app can live within GAE's limitations, then GAE presents advantages: free up to a certain quota, almost no system configuration / administration overhead, etc. But if you need total flexibility -- for example, if you want to code part of your apps in C or C++, and that's just one of many examples -- then GAE is not suitable, while Amazon (for a price, in both money and sysadm overhead) can accomodate you.
If you've already written your app, and just want to deploy it, I'd have to say AWS is your best bet. AWS is a platform (or rather, EC2 is), and deploying an existing app is easy. App Engine, on the other hand, provides an entire development environment, at a much higher level of abstraction, which has significant advantages when it comes to scaling, but requires you to have written your app to work on it.
Now how about Free Amazon EC2 for a year to do a better comparision. Check this out.
http://www.buzzingup.com/2010/10/amazon-announces-free-cloud-services-for-new-developers/
No one is king in this field because both amazon and google have their own pros and cons. for the finally decision you have to study deep about both or you have to analyze what you required for you apps.
no doubt aws is old in this field and they have lot of good quality stuff but remember google is fast growing in cloud computing.
personally aws is easy to use and training and support is easily available on the other side google is his early stage and bit complex interface for newbie
so you can learn from you requirement