There are so many cloud-computing platforms to choose from. I'm not so close to the industry that I can rattle off the names of even the top 10, but you have providers larger (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle) and smaller (Digital Ocean, Linode, Heroku) with offerings that seem wildly different.

I have no idea if Red Hat's cloud belongs in the "large" or "small" group, but I did use it in the pre-Kubernetes days, so it's definitely on my mind.

Trying to figure out the pricing of running your services/websites/etc on these clouds can be anything from easy to impossible. That's part of the game. Can you get along with a Digital Ocean "droplet," do you need 10 of them, or should you go for a mix of the many dozen products offered by Amazon's AWS?

Some cloud providers might be more "tailored" to your workloads, but how exactly do you find that out. Others tout a lack of "lock-in." And then there are things like price, security, reliability, usability and support.

So there's a lot to consider. For small users (and at least for this small user), you want it to work, you want to be able to figure things out, and you don't want billing surprises.

If you do anticipate growth, a provider that can work with you on that "journey" might be one to consider. Or you can just move your stuff from one service to another and hope for minimal downtime during those transitions. If you know what you're doing, maybe a sudden move (or even a gradual one, workload by workload) is realistic.

Given the explosion in cloud computing, there must be an exploding industry of consultants and admins working in this crowded and confusing space that's constantly shifting and growing right under our feet.

Google's "little" VMs, one of which I'm seemingly getting for free, at least for a year, can be run pretty much like any Debian Linux system. That's great if you're a Debian expert, not so great if you're not.

Luckily I know how to get around in Debian, and like pretty much everybody I can search (or "Google" if you will) for everything else.

One thing I can say is that the Google Cloud Platform virtual terminal, which opens in a web window, is very usable.

Much cloud pricing is complicated (barring those like Digital Ocean, which spell out what's going to cost you per month), but it appears that Google is giving us one "micro"-VM for free with no time limit as part of the "Google Platform Free Tier":

• 1 f1-micro instance per month (US regions us-central1, us-east1 and us-west1 only)
• 30 GB-months HDD
• 5 GB-months snapshot in select regions
• 1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations per month (excluding China and Australia)

Somehow I either had to sign up for a credit. You can get a free shell without signing up, but to get the actual VM, you need to fork over a credit card number and "accept" the credit over one year. I'm not sure if/when/how I'll be charged, but I will definitely be keeping my eye on that.

My sites definitely consume more than 1 GB per month: In March 2019, http://stevenrosenberg.net used 4.69 GB, and http://updates.stevenrosenberg.net used 216 MB.

This is a compelling use case for Digital Ocean because that service offers VMs with 1 TB of bandwidth, which is 1000+ times what Google is offering for "free." The predictable, consistent yet low pricing is very attractive.

Still, there's something to be said for /home/public//cgi-bin/ode.cgi, and if I keep an eye on the bandwidth and charges, I'll see what kind of value proposition the Google Cloud Platform offers for smaller users.

When a device driver kills your computer's performance, but only when run in conjunction with a certain web browser, and that certain web browser is not Google Chrome, good luck with getting your problem fixed.

That's what's happening to my HP Envy 15 as133cl laptop. Running Google Chrome poses no problems.

But when I run Mozilla Firefox, the laptop's Conexant audio driver has a program called Flow that does something related to figuring out what kind of audio your PC might want to play. And when Firefox is running, Flow can't seem to figure out what is going on and runs all the time, taking a large percentage of available CPU along with it.

I solved this problem with an Internet search. It was easy and painless.

After I installed the new driver, the problem returned. I'm lazy enough that all I did was bring up the Windows Task Manager (ctrl-alt-delete, then select it) and kill Flow from there. I haven't rebooted since, Flow hasn't returned, and I'm having zero issues with audio on the computer.

Update: It's annoying that killing those two processes doesn't stop Flow from killing laptop performance. There is a third Conexant process that I should kill to see if it takes care of the Flow problem. Why it's STILL a problem, I don't know. If it affected Chrome, it would cause a major uproar and be fixed in a week or less.

When my Fedora 28 upgrade blew up, I didn't turn to Google's repository for Chrome when I reinstalled F28, sticking with Firefox only for as long as I could.

Eventually I needed a Chrome-equivalent browser, and I turned to the Fedora-packaged Chromium. It runs great, and I like that it's packaged by Fedora developers.

But it ships without the codecs required to watch video from places like YouTube.

It didn't bother me for awhile, but situations do come up where I need to see a video, and it's a little interruptive to start Firefox if I'm not using that browser already.

So I did a little web search and learned that there is a package from RPM Fusion that will take care of this issue.

If you already have the RPM Fusion repositories set up on your Fedora computer (and I recommend that you do it if you haven't already), just open a terminal and run this:

$ sudo dnf install h264enc

That will get you video in the Fedora-packaged Chromium browser. That's it. Easy, right?

If this works, I will eat my hat and maybe six other hats. Not only does the open-source Syncthing allow you to sync files between any number of computers running any number of operating systems (including Windows, Mac, Linux and ALL of the BSDs), it does this WITHOUT NEEDING A SERVER. The client software appears to handle the whole thing.

If I understand it correctly, the clients "talk" to each other, and there is no server or cloud service to maintain or pay for.

If this works, it looks like you can replace Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, and any number of cloud-based services that cost money and very likely don't work on your non-Windows/Mac hardware.

I give Dropbox extreme credit for always having a Linux client and not being a total and complete hypocrite like Google, who build their entire infrastructure off of Linux, give their developers Linux computers, base Chrome OS on Linux yet can't be bothered to release a Linux client for their consumer/business storage service. I'm not expecting Microsoft to release a Linux client for OneDrive, but Google? Come on!

Right now I use Dropbox, but I wish I had many alternatives. I like SpiderOak, and they do offer a Linux client, so that's a service to consider.

NextCloud and the project that spawned it, OwnCloud, offer a store-your-own file setup, and they do offer Linux clients.

But since I've been playing around with OpenBSD again, it would be nice to be able to sync to that OS, and the lack of Dropbox compatibility has kept me from fully using OpenBSD. Syncthing does offer OpenBSD software, and it would be great to have that capability.

If Syncthing lives up to the hype, it'll be the world's biggest game-changer for me. But how CAN it work if all of the client computers aren't turned on simultaneously? That's something I'll have to figure out. Maybe you do need one client computer set up and running all of the time to make this a true syncing service. That's where a Raspberry Pi with a huge hard drive come in, right?

So what about hosting your own syncing "service"? It sounds very attractive, and with Syncthing, I can see myself doing it.

Major aside: I recently started thinking about using the Linux desktop more, and that led me back to OpenBSD, which is generally more fun, and good on you if that's a thing you (like me on occasion) associate with computer operating systems. I hesitate to call it a sickness, but I won't say anything if you do. I set up OpenBSD 6.4 on my old HP laptop, where I can easily swap hard drives in and out, and so far it's been fun and educational. I even got the JVM working, so I can develop in Java. I need to try something with JavaFX. If I can get a Java GUI to pop up in OpenBSD, that will be something. My blogPoster Ruby script also works on OpenBSD.

Syncthing is flexible: There are Syncthing packages for all of the BSDs, even Dragonfly, and many Linux architectures, including ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and even s390x.

Answers to some Syncthing questions: Sam Schlinkert has a post that answers some of my questions, including the one on whether setting up a Raspberry Pi can help Syncthing do its thing.