Not everyone is thinking in terms of an employer, or looking to build a profitable business. One of the main sticking point for my side projects is related to deployment environments.
Heroku is painless enough for unprofitable hobby projects, but far too expensive. Using AWS, GCP or Azure directly is relatively affordable, but requires a lot of extra work.
I'm aware of various tools that are supposed to make working with the various cloud platforms much easier, but every time I see one of these used in practice (eg at work), people seem to spend an enormous amount of time getting things working properly. It still feels like we're missing a sweet spot for hobbyists who don't want to invest their spare time learning about and wrangling with devops, just to get a simple project up and running.
Has anyone ever recommended Kubernetes to anybody as a production environment for an "unprofitable hobby project"? In the context of the article we’re discussing, the suggestion that $30 is an unreasonable operations overhead for a team of four engineers is thoroughly preposterous.
Tangential, but if anyone wants something Heroku-like in for deployments and monitoring but less [eae-of-use gui] control over scaling I recommend Digital Oceans “one click” Dokku deployment.
I’ve used it at work for sunset of our projects and it’s been pretty good once you learn a few of the gotchas. Once you’re set up it’s pretty painless. There are limitations for sure, but it’s been handy for a few situations where we didn’t want to focus on deployments and keep them as simple as possible.
Heroku is painless enough for unprofitable hobby projects, but far too expensive. Using AWS, GCP or Azure directly is relatively affordable, but requires a lot of extra work.
I'm aware of various tools that are supposed to make working with the various cloud platforms much easier, but every time I see one of these used in practice (eg at work), people seem to spend an enormous amount of time getting things working properly. It still feels like we're missing a sweet spot for hobbyists who don't want to invest their spare time learning about and wrangling with devops, just to get a simple project up and running.