Ask HN: Web App Environment Recommendation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Web App Environment Recommendation?

1 pointJoeOfTexas5 comments

I am working on a webapp, that needs this environment setup:

-------------------------------------

Public Routes:

- API (nodejs / 1+ instances)

- WebSockets (nodejs / 1+ instances)

- Object Storage (proxy)

Private Routes:

- Redis (docker / cluster)

- RabbitMQ (docker / cluster)

- MySQL (standalone / cluster)

Hidden (connects to Public/Private routes):

- worker1 (nodejs)

- worker2 (nodejs)

- worker3 (nodejs)

-------------------------------------

In researching environments for hosting, I found 3 options:

1) VPS/Docker for each service

2) All services in a single Bare metal server

3) Kubernetes

There are downsides to each. But, looking at costs, bare metal server would be the most economical, and Kubernetes is way outside my budget.

My budget is roughly $100, and my time is just as limited.

The webapp is scale ready, but that's not very important if I have no users on launch day.

What environment recommendations do you have that would let me run such a configuration for my webapp?

Packaging your applications as docker images from the beginning requires little extra effort, but gives you a number of deployment options and if you grow it will be easy to move to eg. k8s.

Setup your servers using ansible, puppet or similar to lower the requirements for redundancy and backups (if you cant take a little downtime in case of accident)

If you're Europe based, one suggestion is to get two ~$50 servers from Hetzner and run all services in plain docker. (i.e. two servers for redundancy)

Depending on your setup and requirements, it might even be enough to have one server + a cheap CDN and in that case you might even be able to run the server at home or a friends office.

These are great suggestions! Looking at ansible and puppet, the learning curve doesn't seem easy to do the full setup. But talking about Docker, I remembered they have Docker Swarm, which might be what I need.

Thanks for the suggestions!

If you add up the cpu/memory requirements for redis, rabbitmq, mysql etc., that itself adds up to a beefy machine. Then the network traffic from the users.

Better to package/run these as docker components on 2 beefy VM's w/ a LB from a provider like DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode or Hetzner. You can pick up AWS etc, but be mindful of all the costs that add up.

Kubernetes is a no-no unless you have some level of proficiency in kubernetes, or are willing to invest the time.

This is quite a bit of infrastructure for an app that hasn't launched yet. If it's not too late, consider simplifying by removing RabbitMQ or Redis. Perhaps even getting rid of both, and only using MySQL. Maybe your workers could become cron-jobs or threads.

For hosting, consider Heroku and Heroku add-ons for MySQL, Redis, and RabbitMQ. You could run workers in Heroku as well.

It would be possible to run this entirely in a VPS as well and fairly straightforward. I've also had success running the web app (with postgres and redis) in Heroku but the workers on a VPS.

Hmm, it may be tricky to redo the infrastructure to remove Redis. I use a triple storage system of Local Cache => Redis => MySQL, where each is a fallback for it's previous. I also use Redis for other things that can be done quicker than sql, like a real-time leaderboard.

RabbitMQ is also integrated heavily between the different services.

Looking at Heroku, it seems a bit overpriced for MySQL and Redis, the cheaper offerings don't offer much RAM.

I might look at VPS/Bare metal to host all the infrastructure. Thanks!

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