I am looking for a free (as in beer) combination of services, for learning “cloud SW development” and very small scale private use (say, a private streamlined web shopping&todo list with simple auth). The combination should include the full set of needed services:
- DVCS service (like github)
- A cloud service to run the backend code
- A suitable data storage service (preferably not SQL), accessed by the backend (if not included in the backend service)
- A web service, serving the web pages seen by user, to access the backend functionality
- A “cloud IDE” (ideally one, two is ok too) for both backend and HTML/javascript coding
- If (backend) deployment uses some CI, then that
Other points:
- Backend programming language can be anything, except VB or PHP
- Everything has to be in the cloud, nothing permanent on a local PC (graphics is not part of the question)
- Looking for ready-to-use service combination, not a virtual server where I can set anything up myself
- I don’t care if service insists on displaying ads in the user web UI
- “Cheap” and “free trial” are ok too, if “free” does not exist
- As per example use case, storage, CPU and bandwidth quota requirements are negligible
Google finds several services of course, all requiring at least registration before testing, so I’m looking for a known-good combination, so ideal answer starts with “I use this service combo: …”, contains links to services and brief description and personal experiences.
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How about Heroku? It has a free plan and offers:
- A cloud service to run the backend code
- A web service, serving the web pages seen by user, to access the backend functionality – If you write the static file handling yourself
- A suitable data storage service, accessed by the backend – Both SQL and NoSQL
- Backend programming languages: Clojure, Java, Python, Scala, Ruby, Javascript
- Ready-to-use service combination
- No ads.
It meets just about all of your criteria, but has some pretty strict limitations. The uploaded code size is limited to 100MB (which should be plenty if you’re not hosting large files)and the databases are limited to 10,000 rows or 16MB, depending on your choice.
You have a couple of criteria it doesn’t meet, however:
- DVCS service
- A “cloud IDE” for both backend and HTML/javascript coding
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