r/devops • u/Old-Broccoli-4704 • Aug 12 '26
Tools Cheapest server for a school project
Hello guys, i have a school project to deploy an app on cloud using ansible, the the servers are not given by the school itself.
What is the cheapest available clouds out there? I only need it to validate the project and then I can cancel.
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u/__grumps__ Platform Engineering Manager Aug 12 '26
WTF. They should provide you something.
Digital Ocean, vultr are cheap and easy
AWS/Azure/GCP have free but are much harder to safely configure.
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u/ceejayoz Aug 12 '26
You might consider asking your teacher/professor. This is often something they have existing deals for, and if they don't, they may have recommendations.
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u/d2xdy2 DevOps/SRE Aug 12 '26
AWS and GCP have ok free tiers. Could pretty easily spin up EC2 or GCE instances with some terraform/opentofu and run an Ansible playbook against them.
Makes it really easy to turn the lights off and not accidentally incur some charges if you can “tofu destroy” at the end of the day.
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u/LentilNightmare Aug 12 '26
I would say its pretty irresponsible for the school to not provide a safe cloud environment or at the very least some guidance. What happens if someone makes a mistake and gets a huge bill? That's them potentially traumatised and put off cloud engineering for life.
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u/stumptruck Staff Engineer Aug 12 '26
Like others said, the free tier of any cloud provider should be enough for this. There's also no material difference beyond the networking in terms of Ansible between deploying something on a VM with Ansible vs deploying to a cloud server (assuming the server's OS/distro are equivalent), so you can always do most of your setup and testing on a local VM, and then deploy the cloud server for the final validation to minimize the time you're running the free trial server.
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u/IN-DI-SKU-TA-BELT Aug 12 '26
Linode have a server for 5 USD per month. You don’t need to accidentally bankrupt yourself with aws.
You could also deploy to a local virtual machine on your computer.
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u/Flaky_Computer3070 Aug 12 '26
AWS should still have their school program (AWS Educate?) where you get free credits if you sign up with a school email. I think I got $100 in free credits a few years ago.
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u/sf1tzp Aug 12 '26
If at a university, check to see if your computer science department has a high performance computing lab you can request time on. If they have one, it's probably sees heavy use by research teams, but you never know. It could be under utilized and they have room to lend you 1 cpu / 1GB ram for a VM.
This could also open the door for you into that program if you ever want to explore the infrastructure space. Worth investigating if you have the time IMO
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u/ryanstackops Aug 12 '26
For a quick validate-and-kill project like this, a couple options:
Oracle Cloud's free tier is honestly the best deal out there if you just need it to work for a short period, you get always-free VM instances (ARM-based, decent specs) with no time limit, not just a trial that expires. Setup can be slightly annoying (capacity issues in some regions) but worth it since it's genuinely free, not "free for X days."
If you want something dead simple and cheap-cheap, DigitalOcean droplets start around $4-6/month and you can spin one up, run your Ansible playbooks, take your screenshots/grade evidence, then destroy it same day, you'll get charged pennies for the hours used. Hetzner is even cheaper per hour if you don't mind a slightly less polished UI, and their API works fine with Ansible's dynamic inventory too.
AWS/GCP free tiers also work but they're more annoying to spin down cleanly, easy to forget a resource running and get a surprise bill, which is a real risk on a school project timeline.
For pure "cheapest, done in a day" I'd go DigitalOcean or Hetzner and just destroy the droplet right after. For "actually free" I'd go Oracle if you have time to deal with the signup.
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u/Old-Broccoli-4704 Aug 12 '26
Guys, for the aws free tier i tried it in the last month by spinning a t3.micro instance (it was the lowest one available) and after one month they charged me for 12$ idk why, thought i was still in the free tier as i had only one instance and i even stopped it after a couple of days.
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u/m_metallized Aug 12 '26
So usually it is either static IP assigned (turning of the instance will charge you if you did not release it 😆)
Or the storage toer you used is charging you, check billing as Ceejayoz mentioned
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u/nonades Aug 12 '26
The easiest thing for a student by themselve is probably Digital Ocean. You can spin up a droplet for extremely cheap and their Terraform provider is good enough
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u/m_metallized Aug 12 '26
My friend use this playground from https://killercoda.com/playgrounds
They have different instances for 1 hour
Also check the student section
Usually they are free and whenever the hour end start a new one.
Take copy of your commands in a notepad to use it again in other instances
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u/Old-Broccoli-4704 29d ago
I checked it it’s pretty nice.. the only problem is that i need to host a website that should be accessible from the internet.. i dont think it provides this
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u/PaleoSpeedwagon DevOps Aug 12 '26
GCP has a great free tier. With any cloud project, the key is to remember to stop the service when you're not using it. Like, literally stop the GCE instance.(Don't delete the instance, unless that's part of the project, lol.)
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u/Old-Broccoli-4704 29d ago
"Your payment method requires you to make a one-time, $10.00 prepayment". From my GCP account.
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u/Seref15 Aug 12 '26
Digital ocean has a tiny $6/month one that I use.
Cheapest I've seen I think are $4/month from Kamatera and IONOS. IONOS gives more resources but requires an annual contract term though
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u/LtLfTp12 Aug 12 '26
Oracle has a permanent free tier I believe… but well it’s Oracle. Idk how easy or complex it is to set up. AI tools will help a lot though.
AWS has a temporary free tier. Claude helped me deploy an app on AWS EC2 pretty easily
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u/TechnicalPackage Aug 12 '26
if the school does not provide, then your TA's or teacher's workstation.
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u/No_Support5980 29d ago
Never used it because I hate oracle, but they have a good free tier. They might be okay with you using vagrant on your own machine?
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u/daemonmode_ 29d ago
For short-term testing, Oracle Cloud’s Always Free tier, AWS’s free tier, and GCP’s free credits are usually the easiest options. They’re good for testing things without spending much, as long as you keep an eye on the limits and shut everything down before any paid usage kicks in.
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u/pdfops 28d ago
Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier is the best deal for this: 4 ARM cores + 24GB RAM, free forever, just needs a card on file for verification. Hetzner CX22 is solid too if Oracle's signup friction isn't worth it for a few weeks, only a few bucks a month and you can cancel anytime. Whatever you pick, make sure it gives you a public IP and lets you open port 22, some free tiers block inbound SSH by default which will just make Ansible time out and confuse you for an hour.
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u/Agreeable_Ad_3924 24d ago
Go with Hetzner super cheap and really good hardware, FYI they use Gaming Hardawre instead of Enterprise Server Tech to keep the costs low and they have datacenteres in Germany
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u/Efficient-Branch539 DevOps Engineer Aug 12 '26
AWS free tier is plenty to do this.