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Future Project Hosting
This project currently relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We do not have indefinite free access to these services, so future developers will either need to find a way to keep the project up and running. Here is an explanation of how we have hosted the project, and some options for keeping the project online.
Amazon Polly: Our speech sythesizer. We choose AWS Polly since it supports SSML. Other Text-To-Speech applications such as Google Cloud TTS use SSML, however don't have as many supported tags as Polly does.
S3 Bucket: Using Amazon Polly, if we exceed a certain amount of characters, we must use S3 bucket to store our mp3 files
Elastic Beanstalk: We use Elastic beanstalk to automate our deployment to the cloud using an EC2 instance. Follow this guide to upload the Flask Application to Elastic Beanstalk.
Recommendation for future hosting: From our client, Amazon Polly's usage of SSML is a have-to-have. Since other text-to-speech applications don't support SSML as well as Polly or is a decent speech sythesizer this is necessary. With Amazon Polly, it would then be necessary to use an S3 bucket to store the audio file somewhere. In the end, having Amazon Polly + S3 are must-haves and you can host the application elsewhere. Possible locations for hosting this Flask application are either Heroku, or PythonAnywhere.
Note: Since this project requires code to be run on the backend, there is no "free" way to have permanent hosting. Hosting must be done on a server somewhere which will eventually cause payment.
AWS allows you to have a free tier account. On this free tier account, there are services split into two groups, always free or 12 months free. If you do pay for Amazon Web Services account, you pay for what you use.
always free: Some services such as DynamoDB, where you can have a maximum of 25GB in space for free forever (as long as you don't exceed that)
12 months free: Services like EC2, S3, and Amazon Polly are free for only 12 months
- EC2: 750 Hours per month free on micro
- S3: 5GB of storage free, allows 20,000 GET requests, and 2,000 PUT requests
- Amazon Polly: 5 million charachters are free per month
Here you can learn about the payment of using Amazon S3, the payment of using EC2, and Amazon Polly.
The following are the requirements to apply for this:
- Full-time faculty at an accredited research institution
- Full-time research staff at an accredited research institution
- Graduate, post-graduate, or PhD students enrolled at an accredited research institution
AWS will review incoming academic research proposals throughout the year. They take 90-120 days to review, so you want to apply early. Awarded amounts will vary depending on the proposal, you can read about them here. Faculty and staff awards are not capped.
Note: Near the end, or over the summer Brian if you contact me (jatr812@gmail.com) I can upload the project to another (your) AWS account and get everything setup for the next research group and provide necessary documentation if need be.
This is a round about way, which you can read about here.
BrianHutchinson Research 2021