Greater purpose – the journey leading to this blog

In the course of the past few months, I have deep dived into a cloud journey over a myriad of service providers. From the big boys like Azure, AWS, and GCP, to the more traditional VPS hosting companies and niche cloud players such as Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud.

I have been a Windows guy for the longest time. The last time I’ve actually touched a Linux machine was in my university days, and it was not by choice. I like Windows for its ease of management with 90% of the things presented in the GUI. Windows being resource-hungry also didn’t concern me much. After all, my Hyper-V server comes with an abundance of CPU power and memory, and I can always assign more vCPU/RAM or create additional VM at little to no cost.

However, things work very differently in the cloud. Compute resources are charged in a granular pay-per-use model. And very soon I realize a 1CPU/2GB Windows-instance could almost get nothing done with the CPU choking at 100% all the time, while a Linux-based instance with the just 1CPU/512MB is passing packets very happily with 380MB free memory. That alone is 4-5 times difference in terms of operating expenses.

In the nature of hopping between service providers, I have come across some common configurations and best practices which I would very much love to document down for future references and to help others who are also on the same journey. So that’s how Jitdor’s Tech Tips come about. I hope you enjoy your stay here, much as I enjoy writing these pieces!