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

Having dealt with payment gateways, I would not assume 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).

On Scaleway, I averaged 53 outages every month. Average response times were slower. Longer outages meant I had to manually hard-restart the server, which corrupted all the database indexes. Scaleway also has a huge problem with machine availability. Last time I checked, everything was out of stock.

I'm hosting on AWS now, and it's about as reliable as DigitalOcean.

Outages are all tracked by Pingdom.

> 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.

...and that's a good reason to try to avoid the lock-in of AWS specific services. Relatively entry level setups on alternative platforms will let you scale well past the system where AWS costs starts to get painful and people start panicking about how to cut costs. When you hit that point you really don't want to be facing a major re-engineering effort to be able to even use other options to bring the cost down just as the costs are soaring.

The CRUD functions themselves are easy to write and test.

Then everything else is handled by the infrastructure layer. Auth, security policies, rate limiting, request timeouts, autoscaling, logs, tracing, etc.

With Rails the developer has to build a lot of this into the application layer. And the dev has to do more operations over time to maintain the app and database.

I am working on a boilerplate app that demonstrates all the functionality you get from “serverless” and documents all of the things we no longer have to worry about:

https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas

Once you have made this investment, you get scale (almost) for free (at least as concerns development/sys admin time). No need to worry about your $5 DO conking out in the middle of the night because you got Slashdotted or whatever the kids call it these days.