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How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

blog.badsectorlabs.com

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Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#11

Post by marknadal »

everdev wrote: post #9
onion2k wrote: post #8

Using Codenvy for development, Github for code, Netlify for deployment and hosting, and Firebase for a database, in total I spend exactly nothing on my side projects.

All great services except Firebase. It's hard to version control development and it's a lock in platform that's hard to migrate away from.

Try https://github.com/amark/gun , it is a popular (~7.5K stars) truly open source (MIT/ZLIB/Apache 2) database that has Firebase like features (realtime sync) plus a lot more, like graph/table/document/relational data and a P2P/decentralized architecture, by yours truly. :)

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#12

Post by quickthrower2 »

everdev wrote: post #9
onion2k wrote: post #8

Using Codenvy for development, Github for code, Netlify for deployment and hosting, and Firebase for a database, in total I spend exactly nothing on my side projects.

All great services except Firebase. It's hard to version control development and it's a lock in platform that's hard to migrate away from.

I'm a parse fan. much more open. Using parse.buddy.com - seems good so far.

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#13

Post by onion2k »

everdev wrote: post #9
onion2k wrote: post #8

Using Codenvy for development, Github for code, Netlify for deployment and hosting, and Firebase for a database, in total I spend exactly nothing on my side projects.

All great services except Firebase. It's hard to version control development and it's a lock in platform that's hard to migrate away from.

It's JSON storage so version control comes from the code rather than a schema or migrations. I'm happy with that.

Lock-in is a problem but it's true for any non-open service you integrate with. I've considered it and figured I'd rather have the features firebase offers than not. Plus I could actually swap to a CouchDB service like Cloudant really easily for my use case (sync'ing JSON structures between browser sessions).

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#14

Post by onion2k »

marknadal wrote: post #11
everdev wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All great services except Firebase. It's hard to version control development and it's a lock in platform that's hard to migrate away from.

Try https://github.com/amark/gun , it is a popular (~7.5K stars) truly open source (MIT/ZLIB/Apache 2) database that has Firebase like features (realtime sync) plus a lot more, like graph/table/document/relational data and a P2P/decentralized architecture, by yours truly. :)

I've used gun. It's really cool.

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#15

Post by marknadal »

onion2k wrote: post #14
marknadal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try https://github.com/amark/gun , it is a popular (~7.5K stars) truly open source (MIT/ZLIB/Apache 2) database that has Firebase like features (realtime sync) plus a lot more, like graph/table/document/relational data and a P2P/decentralized architecture, by yours truly. :)

I've used gun. It's really cool.

Thanks!

Firebase still has a ton of features we don't have, what would you say are the most important things for us to work on?

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#16

Post by outworlder »

"Getting a push alert any time there is an error helps us respond to issues as soon as they come up. "

Oh god no.

Maybe if this system is not expected to ever grow in complexity. Otherwise this will become a big source of frustration really soon. And even if it does not, it's very easy to get a flood of non-actionable alerts for a transient condition.

It would be better to collect error rates and alert on that. Also the other golden signals.

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#17

Post by sudhirj »

everdev wrote: post #7

> After the free-tier expires it will be less than $5, but the fact remains: it's crazy cheap. I like the idea behind serverless development, but DO is $5/month and is easy to setup and maintain. From what I understand as your business grows AWS costs skyrocket and just starting out it's more complicated than a DO solution. The idea is great, but looking forward to the day where serverless is the default solution bec…

The costs skyrocket if you’re not doing it right - otherwise it tends to be linear with request count. The nice thing, though, is that you don’t have to panic or do anything at any scale - it’ll just keep running along.

Once you hit high levels of traffic, instead of panicking and trying to add more servers and fixing DB structure, you do a cost benefit analysis and see what to do next. Either work on reducing your cost slope, or make it logarithmic by moving to regular servers.

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#19

Post by everdev »

marknadal wrote: post #15
onion2k wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used gun. It's really cool.

Thanks! Firebase still has a ton of features we don't have, what would you say are the most important things for us to work on?

I love the plug and play nature of Firebase for simple CRUD apps, so the simplicity of Firebase user auth was a huge win. Is that on the roadmap?

Re: How we built Hamiltix.net for less than $1 a month on AWS

#20

Post by marknadal »

everdev wrote: post #19
marknadal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Firebase still has a ton of features we don't have, what would you say are the most important things for us to work on?

I love the plug and play nature of Firebase for simple CRUD apps, so the simplicity of Firebase user auth was a huge win. Is that on the roadmap?

Yes, we just announced/released the alpha of our auth framework a while ago, called SEA (Security, Encryption, Authorization).

Because it is based on P2P/decentralized cryptography, it is actually pretty hard and cutting-edge to implement (you get end-to-end encryption automatically with it!), but we've made it ridiculously easy for developers to use:

- Easy getting started guide: https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi...

- 4 minute nad 40LOC interactive coding tutorial: https://scrimba.com/c/c2gBgt4

It is alpha though, still has several more features that need to be added to make it usable for different types of app (so you might want to stick with Firebase till then). Please let me know if you have any questions or anything else I can help with!

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