Ask HN: What is easiest back end to learn and scale cheaply for apps?

4 points·th3proph3t··7 comments

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I'm probably going to get some hate for this, but the LAMP stack.

- Can all be run off one big server

- No licenses or costs

- Super stable and battle proven

- Deployment, development, and debugging is stupidly simple

- If you don't want to do your own server admin there are millions of hosts

- Everything can be solved by Googling and copying and pasting

- Developers are easy to come by

- Frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony exist (not that you have to use one)

Remember, you said easiest... not best. :)

* Although "best" is subjective!!!

Why care about scaling cheaply before you have success. But my advice would be a lambdalith. Get Django, dotnetcore minimal api, fastapi, node.js or laravel, deploy it on lambda with a wrapper for free and if you scale up to the point lambda is too expensive, docker it into a vps.

https://mangum.io/ Or https://codewithmukesh.com/blog/hosting-aspnet-core-web-api-... for examples.

When it comes to mobile apps firebase is king it seems.

(keep in mind that the lambda guide is outdated, AWS Lambda startup performance and base memory footprint got massively improved* with Native AOT, which official SDK makes full use of: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/dotnet-native-a..., though if you need a (micro) ORM, you will have to use Dapper AOT instead of EF Core)

* Native AOT uses same GC (defaults may differ), the main profit comes from a) less data to load in memory on startup and b) no need for extra memory used by the JIT, long running applications will amortize to similar memory usage provided GC settings are identical

Check this:

- https://free-for.dev/#/

C# with ASP.Net Core is amazing.

The C programming language

Serverless event-driven architectures are great.

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