How does free cloud compute time on a virtual machine with an available 156 cores, 1040GB memory and 59.1 TB of disk storage running the latest OpenStack release, Del PowerEdge C6100 and C6105 servers and libvirt/KVM sound?

You guessed it: There’s a catch. With the new OpenStack promo service TryStack, free time is limited like on-demand movie from the cloud — that’s 24 hours to watch this feature film before a script wipes out your TryStack existence.



Hey, it’s free right? Yes, but not so fast. TryStack, initially backed by OpenStackers Dell, HP, NTT and Rackspace Hosting, offers a set amount of “Stack Dollars” registered users can use to lease virtual machine instances. TryStack notes, however: “Don’t get too hung up on Stack Dollars, they are really just there to prevent abuse.”

So who and what is this for?

Rule No. 1: Remember that TryStack is designed exclusively as a testing sandbox. We wanted a fast, easy way for developers to test code against a real OpenStack environment, without having to stand up hardware themselves. It probably goes without saying that this is not the place for production code – you should host only test code and test servers here. In fact, your account on TryStack will be periodically wiped to help make sure no one account tries to rule tyrannically over our democracy. Play nice in the sandbox!

Still, it’s a sandboxed playground for you to try out some apps on OpenStack. Where do I sign up, you ask? “In order to receive our private message, you should friend TryStack Admin Facebook account.”

Seems to me like they could let people have a little more time. Or maybe let users earn more Stack Dollars and buy some time by contributing. At least they make it very clear you have to get in and get out.

If you do try it out, let us know here on Cloudline if you find it worthwhile. Is OpenStack all that?