About six months ago I published a post describing the various low-cost cloud-computing options that can be used for setting up an EOS testnet. I had written a bit of a follow-up to that in another post, however it's quite likely that the "cloud update" part of my post was lost in the shuffle, as the post was more about one of the bitshares issues I uncovered at the time.

I had been meaning to set up an additional machine to give scaleway.com a try, because the specs were quite impressive, especially for an entry-level dual core cloud droplet with 2gb of RAM for USD $3.50 per month! This price fluctuates a bit, as the company and its collocation facilities are based in Amsterdam and Paris.

However, as I wrote in my article, "EOS: What's Your BEST Bang-for-the-Buck Cloud Provider?":

... the bang-for-the-buck offered by Scaleways, along with its unmetered bandwidth, certainly has compelled me to give it a spin and see if there's a use case for it. Perhaps it can serve as an inexpensive test bed for messing around with a multi-node EOS testnet (once the P2P code is reimplemented). While scaleway's atom processors are definitely less powerful than Digital Ocean's or vultr's, it's hard to beat with 2 CPUs / 2gb memory for around $3.25/mo or 8 CPUs / 8gb memory for around $13.50/mo!

Also interesting with scaleways is that they are one of the first providers to offer ARMv8 servers as well, which are available as KVM virtual cloud servers (at the same price as X64), or as Bare Metal (dedicated) servers, also starting at around $3.25/month. On the negative side, I have read multiple reports that service and support may be "minimal" (to put it kindly) versus what you may come to expect from vultr or DO. But once again, each may have its niche given the right situation and use case.

Worst case it sucks, best case, well who knows... but for that price I just had to at least give it a go. I mean, how could I really go that wrong with their 3 euro / month VM?! (I know, I know... please don't try and answer that question! lol 😁)

So I signed up for one of their entry-level x86 virtual cloud droplets sporting 2 x86 64-bit Intel Atom cores at 2.4ghz, 2gb memory, 50gb SSD, and 200Mbit unmetered bandwidth. I installed an Ubuntu 16.04 droplet with an xfce desktop (accessed remotely via x2go), and truth be told, now nearly 5 months later, it's been pretty much rock solid ever since!

Here you can see my xfce desktop accessed remotely via x2go and Pageant (the PuTTY / SSH authentication agent), currently running a backup copy of STEEMIT's condenser front-end, while connecting to my STEEM node proxy running on the same machine!

(how cool is that?!)

And here we are running the excellent and free Visual Studio Code editor:

I did run into one issue running VSCode via xRDP under this configuration. However, I relatively easily solved it using the "hack" described on VSCode's github (it's probably safest to make a backup of the target file first, just in case!):

sudo sed -i 's/BIG-REQUESTS/_IG-REQUESTS/' /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1

It can run an EOS testnet too?!

Yes, it most certainly can! However, 2gb still won't cut it for EOS to compile. But, given it also sports 50GB of SSD storage, I had plenty of extra disk space to create a swapfile. After creating a 6gb swapfile, it was more or less smooth sailing from there. I would also recommend that if you don't plan to dive into the EOS source code itself, just using the docker install, as provided and explained on the EOS github page.

Just be aware that whatever system you use to try and compile EOS, it'll likely take a good 6 hours or so for everything to compile before you're ready to go. Once that's done, just go ahead and run it, and you should find yourself staring at something that looks like this:

So far, it's been a great experience, and it's amazing how often I've been able to take advantage of it for testing out a variety of different things. Any outages that may have occurred were negligible. I think I may recall one brief outage that was resolved in relatively short order. As for latency, from my FIOS connection in New York City to the droplet in Amsterdam, round-trip ping times average around 82ms.

In Conclusion

Whether you could use an extra machine for running testnets, sandboxing apps, passing VPN traffic, or as a development testbed, for $3.50/month (and now, for a limited time only, just 29 cents SBD per month!) you really can't go wrong having access to one of these scaleway cloud instances at your fingertips.

And for those of you not yet aware of it, STEEM DOLLARS are still trading around USD $12.50 a piece! If ever there was a time to start cranking out some high-quality posts, it's now! Hopefully this anomalous situation will last long enough for us to cash out more SBD. Regardless, it's just another great incentive for you to build up your STEEMIT presence, as well as your STEEM POWER, where a "measely" 20 extra SBD from your 50/50 post payouts can now be traded in for a whopping 125 STEEM on the internal market!

It also seems that you can now select 50/50 comment payouts on STEEMIT also, so make sure you all take advantage of that as well!