Ask HN: What is your favorite deployment/hosting choices for Rails 5? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your favorite deployment/hosting choices for Rails 5?

18 pointswuliwong13 comments

We are looking to move a Rails 5 application (as well as a Django app) from Heroku to either AWS or Google Cloud. My knee jerk plan was to host on AWS but I wasn't sure about a deployment/development "strategy" (ie. Kubernetes). I've also been told Google Cloud might be cheaper depending on our requirements. I was given a little tour of Google Cloud by a friend who uses it and at least during that quick overview GC seemed a bit easier to use than AWS. That is important to me as I am not a devops guru by any stretch of the imagination.

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I've been working on a solution for deploying Rails called Hatchbox. (https://hatchbox.io) Basically wanted to offer something as easy to deploy as Heroku, but on your own servers so you could host on DigitalOcean, AWS, etc. A lot of people have been deploying 50% cheaper than their Heroku bills which is fantastic.

Feel free to email me, chris@gorails.com if you have any questions or want to chat and see if it'd be a good solution for you!

Unaffiliated with Hatchbox. +1 for the ease of use and reliability.

Appreciate that! :D

Why do you want to move off Heroku? If you're not a devops guru, then you will likely spend more time (and money) on ops-related work if you do end up moving, especially when things go wrong. Have you factored that workload into your costs? Heroku is kind of your devops guy, in this case, and it's the premium you're paying Heroku for. If you move to something like AWS or GCP, you may need to fill that void you've created with a real person, especially if you start going with something like k8s. Just something to think about.

You might want to try Elastic Beanstalk (AWS's platform as a service) in combination with Deploybot (https://deploybot.com/).

Deploybot will allow you to do "git push style" deploys similar to Heroku.

As a "not a devops guru" myself, this combination has served me very well in serving Rails and Sinatra apps.

Edit: If I were based in the the US (I'm in Australia) I would use Heroku. Unfortunately you can't get Heroku in an Australian DC without going on a crazy huge enterprise plan.

> I was given a little tour of Google Cloud by a friend who uses it and at least during that quick overview GC seemed a bit easier to use than AWS

this sounds a bit far-fetched to me depending upon the expertise of your friend on both the platforms, he might be more experienced on GCP but not so much on AWS. Anyways my point is devops, in general, is platform agnostic, unless you are going all in on a single provider you can even mix and match few things. As mentioned by many devops gurus, Docker is the absolute must when it comes to things like microservices and devops stuff. I would suggest you compare the two platforms as per your convenience(pricing, brand association etc) then go ahead and deploy your app (monolithic or bundle of microservices) as Docker containers first. Do not worry about scaling at the beginning. Once you get some comfort level on managing your Docker containers you have to move towards automation culture that is the deployments can be done with an automated build pipeline for that naturally as a next step you must use Docker swarm. This process would expose you to the world of devops and microservices/serverless architectures etc. Then you can as a replacement to Docker swarm can try and play with Apache Mesos or kubernetes.

I was saying this from my perspective. I was comparing what I saw on GC to my past experience with AWS. I have some experience using AWS in the past and it has always been super confusing to me. The other day was my first experience looking at the google cloud platform and it seemed much simpler to understand. But again, this was just a very superficial overview.

Deployment + Hosting: Amazon ElasticBeanstalk, Google App Engine, Azure App Service, Heroku

Deployment Tool: Buddy https://buddy.works

Hosting: Amazon EC2, Digital Ocean https://www.digitalocean.com/ , Vultr https://www.vultr.com/ , Azure VM, Google Compute Engine

> That is important to me as I am not a devops guru by any stretch of the imagination.

Go for AWS then. The amount and quality of tutorials, guides and the size of the community is leaps and bounds over Google Cloud. Very useful if you are new to all this.

Btw, for some small/medium scale projects that I have done, I deployed them on DigitalOcean. It's quick and easy compared to everything else. Unless you are running something large scale, you might want to consider DigitalOcean.

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks.

Have you worked with Heroku to lower your bill?

I have not. You have done this before?

Yeah. I think you need a corporate account though. Do you have metrics in place to see if you can improve performance? Have you played with dyno resizing based on load or time?

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