I feel the need to discuss something about free vs paid vm's out there, since i'm sincerely disappointed...
Today i've been looking around for a VM to try and train some deep learning algorithms. I don't have a lot of experience
with this, other than seeing my computer become very hot and slow while trying this, so i decided to look for a virtual machine.
I could not however, find a cloud provider that does not ask for my credit card details, I understand these providers do need to limit the usage in some way, so i didn't expect anything amazing, but what i found was worse than bad.
I finally got my hands on an azure test drive from microsoft, running a ubuntu 16.04 virtual machine (with "all necessary tools installed"). However, the first thing i saw was that i could only use it for 8 hours, which makes it basically useless.
On top of that, the python3 install was broken, there was no pip binary... running apt-get update would recommend autoremoving around 800 packages. even though it was promised, there was no tensorflow or keras installation. so you can see, if this is what
you can expect, i'm glad i didn't pay for it. I was unable to install simple modules like pip or tensorflow, and even the python installation itself gave me errors right from the bat.
After losing an hour of time, trying to setup something usefull, i just left it. but i did feel the need to discuss this, and hopefully draw the attention of the providers. maybe spark a debate about some minimum requirements that need to be met, before
asking someones credit card data. I know it's practically impossible to provide everyone with a free (even though limited in time) virtual machine, regardless of the specs, but i do not understand how people would pay for something like this. I only had 8
hours time to test it, and after an hour trying to install the most basic tools, i realized the vm was never going to be useful.
