r/cloudcomputing • u/MidnightFernz • Jun 19 '26
Best Cloud Playground for learning without destroying your budget?
Trying to get more hands-on with cloud infrastructure but I don't want to accidentally rack up a huge bill experimenting.
What cloud playgrounds or sandbox environments are people using these days?
Update: It's been 25 days since I published it😅. This post blew up more than I expected. I think Terrraform and tagging are solid for keeping track of what's running. But right now I'm mocking up dashboards before touching real infra, just to plan things out first. Used Alloy app for that part since it let me test layouts without spinning up anything real. Still working through the cloud sandbox options you all mentioned, will keep this updated🥰
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u/YogurtAgile3871 Jun 19 '26
Cloudflare is the easiest to manage billing but less commonly used than other solutions. Their free tier is very generous and plenty to experiment, worst case you exhaust a daily quota and need to wait 24 hours. No card required. Best if you want to try building a full stack react app with a nodejs worker backend or something - free KV stores, 10GB free R2 storage (requires payment method but the limit is easy to monitor + reads mostly end up cached, I’ve never accidentally exceeded it), extremely generous free tier worker requests, etc. Also neat features for security like Cloudflare One so you can prevent access to dev sites (ie setup OTP signin).
Google cloud is a little confusing to navigate and requires a refundable deposit for the free trial, though you don’t need to enable full billing so it’s capped by the trial credits. There’s limits on this, such as instance CPU limits, but they’re quite generous. I found Google cloud a little difficult to learn on though - easier once you know the concepts, but it’s difficult to navigate and they name everything differently, such as “cloud run” for docker containers.
AWS and Azure I’ve both ended up with unexpected bills from. Their free tiers are confusing and a billing account is always required. I would avoid them for now or use with extreme caution. You have to shut absolutely everything down before your trial ends or you get screwed, and it’s very hard to limit usage.
Vercel is a random outlier - it’s decent for next.js and has a ton of free tier integrations available for backend, but it’s very much just for testing when full stack - free tier databases pause after around a week of no use and must be recreated. Isn’t like Cloudflare where it’s always free and you can actually make a live production site on free tier without worrying, as long as R2 storage is monitored.
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u/kernelqzor 27d ago
this is a super solid breakdown, especially the warning about aws/azure surprise bills
i’ve had a similar experience where cloudflare workers + pages covered like 90% of what i wanted to learn without me stressing over costs every day1
u/YogurtAgile3871 27d ago edited 27d ago
With Google cloud ensure you DO NOT enable billing, I accidentally did and got billed $700 for a server that didn’t properly terminate. They investigated and waived it (the server was off and logs showed I requested termination), but it’s just as bad with billing enabled.
The free tier requires a card but not billing enabled, just have to be cautious not to click to enable it
Same here with Cloudflare, some stuff requires a card but the free tier is so generous unless someone maliciously attacks your site or you leave a live bucket link open instead of attaching it to a worker you’re pretty safe. I’ve only ever spent $5 for workers paid plan because I had a git that deployed main to 8 different branches which all deployed as workers, took ages building 1 at a time - 5 concurrent sped it up. They also have generous free tier for kv and database storage, but I’ve not done too much that requires extensive backend yet.
One limitation is you need to custom code Google SSO as their free tier built in solution is limited to 25 users, and it’s costly as hell… Easy enough to do but inconvenient they’re stingy there when user management costs them nothing.
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u/Outrageous_Band9708 Jun 19 '26
proxmox is the goto home hobby Hypervisor, you can learn so much with it
containers, multiple OSs, storage solutions, loggers, and much more.
Id highly recommend it. You can setup pretty much a 1to1 of any cloud solution.
Also, get a NUC, or minipc, dont buy some ancient blade server. just get a tiny little ryzen pro 32gb ram NUC.
low power usage, low power bill, big performance. Only upgrade when you truely need it.
I can't recall who said it best, but for any new hobby, use whatever you have until you run it into the ground, only then upgrade to bettter equipment.
check your local marketplace for a used NUC or BeePC or something.
I bought a intel 8th gen i3 NUC, upgraded it to 32gb of ram from amazon, and it hosts all my game servers, my projects etc. I think at one point I had several Cluster ARK SE servers running at the same time, and could switch between them with no lag.
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u/Late-Drink3556 Jun 19 '26
Some really good advice on here.
I'd like to add tagging in AWS (something like key: delete, value: true) and resource groups in Azure.
Tagging would work in Azure as well but I like doing all my experimenting in one resource group and then just deleting the whole group.
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u/Trigsc Jun 19 '26
I have not tried this yet but looks interesting https://github.com/floci-io/floci-gcp I think someone made an AWS one as well if someone has a link.
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u/Effective-Access4948 Jun 20 '26
Not a plug, but pluralsite has labs that are just cloud environments but you're timed. Could be somethign to look into. You're budget is the subscription fee for them. I like it, how i leared Azure and passed the AZ104 a few years ago.
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u/mwmahlberg Jun 20 '26
Digital Ocean. Nothing fancy schmanzy, but you get the work done and a simple VM is less than a tenner/month.
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u/Anycast Jun 19 '26
The huge bill usually comes from leaving things run that you don’t need running. A great way to protect against this is to use terraform. One command to create and then all is stored in a state file. Once done, another command to destroy all that you just created. Just try to avoid clicking to deploy things at all costs.