Ask HN: Should I deploy my webapp

2 pointsargestes3y ago2 comments

Hello, I'm a ~10 years Android developer. These days I'm looking into building my own applications with Spring and Kotlin. Firebase doesn't fix my problems of data integrity hence I've coded the backend of my app too (which is sad considering how promising Firebase was)

I'm trying to find a way to deploy my servers. Currently I'm running my production and staging servers as two Hetzner instances running docker-compose stacks. But I've heard it's not a good solution since docker-compose can't really create a development environment as a copy of production (I don't know why this is bad.)

I've looked into Kubernetes but if you're not paying to someone to manage it for you (for example DigitalOcean or Amazon EKS) it's incredibly complex. Also if you chose to use a cloud provider to manage it for you every load balancer adds another item to the bill. I'm running a 3 node cluster on DigitalOcean now but it's too complex to even deploy a container to it.

So what are your thought on how a lone developer should deploy their APIs to production and staging?

2 comments

mcny3y ago

> Currently I'm running my production and staging servers as two Hetzner instances running docker-compose stacks. But I've heard it's not a good solution since docker-compose can't really create a development environment as a copy of production (I don't know why this is bad.)

What are your concerns? What bad things™ will happen if your production environment goes down for a few minutes, hours, or days? Where do you store your state on the server?

What can kubernetes do that you can't do by hand assuming you are available to do it?

How much do you spend on production vs non production infrastructure?

argestesOP3y ago

My concern is I'm an Android dev. and I'm trying to use best practices because I don't know what can come up.

If prod goes down for a few days it's mostly OK since I have only one alpha user. But some idea of bad things™ might happen is holding me back from developing the app. I'm not feeling confident about my prod env if I find some customers.

> Where do you store your state on the server? I don't understand what you mean. I guess we're talking about the database. DB also is deployed as the part of the docker compose stack, volume bound to a local dir.

> What can kubernetes do that you can't do by hand assuming you are available to do it? Automating the process of deployments are easier than doing it by hand. Since code needs to be compiled I cannot use the old but gold ftp method. Even if I manage it, it's too much of a hassle. Instead I'm using Github Actions to build my image using Spring's container image builder magic. k8s would allow me to put all of my "stuff" to same place (a cluster)

Two of the servers costs in total 5 Euros now :D

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