I get it that cloud services are designed to scale up to thousands of machines, etc, but can't there be a Baby's First Machine mode where I don't have to create a resource group arena, a network collection menagerie, a security envelope bundle, and a user population demographic first? I just want one machine. Default everything for me!
@nedbat Where did you end up landing?
I think DO or Hetzner's droplets are sort-of what it sounds like you want. On my last DO droplet, the process to use their firewall was straight forward once I have the machine up and running.
@webology I didn't get into the details in my rant-post, but I need a temporary Windows machine for debugging a coverage.py issue.
@nedbat @webology I had the same thing happen a few years ago, and this was back in the days where MS was giving out some free licenses or Azure machines or something to core devs.
I think I eventually gave up. Nowadays I usually don't spend my time on Windows-only or Mac-only bugs since I usually can't reproduce them easily enough to fix them.
@nedbat @webology I did learn that if you sign up for an Azure cloud account, Azure PMs will aggressively "follow up" with you immediately and also for weeks afterwards.