GCP vs AWS (thru Acloudguru Playground) vs Other Options for Class Environment

Gnome1984

Hello,

I was looking to get some recommendations on the Lab Environment. I am running bare bones in Ubuntu 20.04 as the base OS. However, the class recommends GCP or AWS using your account, I have a membership to Acloudguru which gives me a temp sandbox enviroment for about 4 hours where I can do things without running up a bill.

Is Acloudguru temp sandbox environments sufficient for the course (4 hour temp accounts but no bill)?
- If so which environment to use AWS or GCP? (I have about equal level of experience in both, very little).

Any other recommendations such as Minikube or VMs?

chrispokorni

Hi @Gnome1984,

I cannot comment on the temp sandbox you have available from another provider, as I am unfamiliar with their environment - CPU, mem, disk, and OS.

The introductory chapter includes two video guides to help provision the needed infrastructure with either of the two major cloud providers - AWS and GCP. They both perform equally well as lab environments.

As far as local environments, other learners completed the exercises on local VMs provisioned with VirtualBox, VMware, KVM. VM size, networking requirements, and recommended OS can be found in the intro chapter and in the lab exercise that presents the installation steps.

Regards,
-Chris

rcrook89

I was wondering this as well, but decided to go with GCP instead of ACloudGuru's temp sandboxes. GCP gives you a $300 introductory credit for 90 days, so I'm hoping this is enough to get through the course.

claudiu.ion

Hello. I tried all platforms that you mentioned and all are good for completing this class.
GCP - free for 3 months with 300$ credit that is more than enough
A Cloud Guru - besides the 4 hours sandboxes, they also have a playground that you can use to spin a few VMs. The VMs are not going to reset after 4 hours.
Local environment: - I use Vagrant + VirtualBox