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Ask HN: Advice for Hosting and Deploying My Side Project

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Re: Ask HN: Advice for Hosting and Deploying My Side Project

#31
Caveat: I have not worked with Rust. The comments below suggesting Heroku, DigitalOcean and other PaaS are good starting points. However, I want my side projects to be able to handle arbitrary load without managing additional infrastructure.

I design my current web apps to work using serverless functions https://serverless.com/ This ensures that if my applications become popular, I will not have to do additional infrastructure work to scale. I use a cloud provider managed database (AWS DynamoDB, RDS for Postgresql) so I don't need to worry about managing that either.

There is a steep learning curve! A quick Google search shows that Rust serverless is in its infancy (https://github.com/softprops/serverless-rust). Also, if you need to have bi-directional communication using WebSockets (or something comparable), the options you have to work with are limited (AWS AppSync is what I am currently struggling with)

That being said, it has been an extremely challenging and rewarding experience, migrating my personal projects.

Re: Ask HN: Advice for Hosting and Deploying My Side Project

#32
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the boycott? (serious question)

Bezos and Amazon and the way they conduct / carry themselves. I no longer respect him as a leader or role model. Plus the DX and quality of GCloud is way better than AWS, I just don't get why everyone is so into AWS...

I agree entirely. Especially after the realization made in this link: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch...

I think the nerd-on people get from AWS comes from two places. One the Amazon brand; most people have an Amazon Prime account and source a lot of their household products or small item stuff from Amazon. Second is that Amazon was first to market with a robust and comprehensive cloud, so there are a ton of learning courses to get people up to speed on AWS fast.

Re: Ask HN: Advice for Hosting and Deploying My Side Project

#33
post #27
post #15

I would have said Heroku. But it doesn't appear its as straight forward for your stack as it is for others. However this looks promising: https://github.com/emk/heroku-buildpack-rust I would have also suggested https://nanobox.io/ - but their pricing is no longer transparent (used to be pretty cheap). It would also involve dockerizing your app. As for clever cloud, their Rust support is in beta... I'd spend a short a…

You might look at this for running rust on heroku: https://elements.heroku.com/buildpacks/rhelmer/heroku-buildp... Note I haven't done this, but it turned up in a search.

FYI that’s a fork of the repo I posted. The fork hasn’t been updated in over 3 years

Re: Ask HN: Advice for Hosting and Deploying My Side Project

#34
One of the more difficult parts of self hosting with a service like digital ocean is managing your own database. Luckily DO just introduced managed postgres databases. Also you can use DO load balancer so you don't have to manage a load balancer and deal with setting up let's encrypt ssl certs, and only have to worry about deploying your web app. I wouldn't go with docker for production just yet because while docker is great for immutable servers and dev/ops parity, it makes things like secret management, logging and monitoring more complicated.

Re: Ask HN: Advice for Hosting and Deploying My Side Project

#35
post #33
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might look at this for running rust on heroku: https://elements.heroku.com/buildpacks/rhelmer/heroku-buildp... Note I haven't done this, but it turned up in a search.

FYI that’s a fork of the repo I posted. The fork hasn’t been updated in over 3 years

Ah, sorry about that, I thought it was better because it had on the heroku domain.

Re: Ask HN: Advice for Hosting and Deploying My Side Project

#36
I used DigitalOcean for my food based web app. I would definitely recommend them.

The skills to setup and maintain the machine are valuable to learn. I would recommend documenting everything as you may not remember everything you initially did. One example would be how to backup your database, or another how to upgrade your database when a security patch comes out.

Some things I did that were helpful:

Stick with long term support (LTS) versions of the linux you choose as this will minimize how often you have to upgrade things.

If you can automate security patches, do so ( Debian and Ubuntu have this )

Setup something like fail2ban to help monitor and block intrusions.

setup key less ssh access.

put your web app behind a proxy like nginx and have it handle the https

Re: Ask HN: Advice for Hosting and Deploying My Side Project

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos and Amazon and the way they conduct / carry themselves. I no longer respect him as a leader or role model. Plus the DX and quality of GCloud is way better than AWS, I just don't get why everyone is so into AWS...

I agree entirely. Especially after the realization made in this link: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/microsoft-google-cloud-pitch... I think the nerd-on people get from AWS comes from two places. One the Amazon brand; most people have an Amazon Prime account and source a lot of their household products or small item stuff from Amazon. Second is that Amazon was first to market with a robust and comprehensive cloud, s…

I wonder how the conversation around the phallic smile logo goes. I could imagine they have a jolly good laugh about shipping it to all these people. Surprised the SJWs and metoo movement haven't taken issue
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