[ale] Difficulty of philosophy changes

[leamhall at gmail.com (Leam Hall)]

I've been working on changing my philosophy for a while now, and it's 
rough. Moving from "must hand do everything" to learning Puppet. 
Accepting that a perfectly tuned platform tomorrow is less useful than a 
functional one today.

My next hurdle is moving personal development platforms off my personal 
hardware. It's been nice to have stuff running on my own laptop but at 
the same time the hardware is old, the OS is old (but duplicates work 
OS), and I'm getting old. I don't want to have to rebuild everything 
when the disk takes a dive.

Yeah, I have backups. But everything slows to a crawl when I have to 
restore to get everything done, and then to find the one bit I forgot to 
backup.

Any good recommendations for small instance cloud providers? I know AWS 
and Rackspace but have not paid attention to others yet. My goal is to 
spin up servers, learn Puppet and stuff, and spin them down. Only paying 
for uptime. RAM and disk needs are pretty minimal. However, even an AWS 
micro instance is ~$60/month if you forget that you have it and forget 
that it's on...

So, I could use a place to play that's not on my old hardware. Thoughts?

Leam
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