I’ve been reflecting on deploying applications and cloud services after
working with my team for the last two weeks. My team began our project knowing that it would be a web application, but we didn’t know how we were going to host it. This prompted a lot of research into cloud platforms.
One platform I was familiar with was Google Cloud. I had worked with this platform before, so I understood the basics. I also investigated a free hosting service called Render that didn’t have full cloud development features.
Let’s go over a few things that I found.
Google Cloud
Google Cloud was the most feature rich platform I found. It also had amazing documentation, and of course the reliability found within Google products. I investigated how to host a backend Node/Express server and a static React front end. I found a few awesome features:
Free credits of a $400 dollar value
Integration with MongoDB, or Google Cloud native NoSQL database Datastore
Integration with Google OAuth
Easy deployment pipeline with Cloud Build to build directly from GitHub to a container in Cloud Run
Cheap hosting on Firebase for static webpages
After researching Google Cloud, I found that it would be a great platform for hosting a personal project or an enterprise project. The free credits expire after 90 days, so if you’re looking for a long-term application you would ultimately have to pay. However, the prices scales by use, so a hobbyist would not incur much of a cost.
Render
Render is a unified cloud to build and run applications. Render’s platform runs on Google Cloud and AWS. Render does not have nearly as many features available for users, and it is not a cloud native environment. This means that Render is only hosting web apps, static apps, or containerized apps. This contrasts to Google Cloud, where you could write individual functions in the cloud, and have other Google Cloud services interact with those functions as part of a larger application.
Render did however offer a lot of great features for hobbyists:
A completely free tier, with no credit card information require
Easy deployments by connecting to GitHub with a few clicks
A simple way to incorporate environmental variables
Static hosting for React frontend
Support for Node for the backend
Conlusion
Overall, Render is very simple and easy to use, but it didn’t offer as many features as Google Cloud. Google Cloud is a fully developed cloud hosting platform, that allows for complete customization, and integrates with many of Googles other features like OAuth. Both platforms would be a good choice for students or hobbyists. However, if you plan to grow your application or just want to learn a relevant skill like Cloud Development, I would pick Google Cloud.
