{"id":14,"date":"2022-10-13T18:42:17","date_gmt":"2022-10-13T18:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/?p=14"},"modified":"2022-10-13T18:42:17","modified_gmt":"2022-10-13T18:42:17","slug":"blog-post-2-exploring-hosting-options","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/2022\/10\/13\/blog-post-2-exploring-hosting-options\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post # 2: Exploring hosting options"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Goal<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Identify and evaluate viability of hosting and deployment options for application considering research costs versus mid-term benefits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Background<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of my research this week has been looking into various hosting options. There’s a few components involved here.

The primary is going to be physically how\/where to host our full stack application. The second is going to be where\/how to store database.

Criteria
<\/strong>– Free
– Some optimal balance of tradeoffs — e.g. “saves time later” against “learning curve now”

RIP Heroku. Free tier ends soon. Godspeed old chap.

Option 1: FLIP
<\/strong>+ Free
+ Familiar
+ Easy to deploy (backend, at least)
– Thought I read some additional work about where to place frontend and how to route incoming traffic to that, unclear at this time
– In 290\/340 MySQL came pre-baked — can’t recall if there’s setup or requests needed to setup in Capstone
– Since FLIP is tied to individual accounts, the responsibility of deployment and database management would fall onto ONE person, not ideal
– No built-in CI\/CD

Summary: Flip is great because it’s a free student resource, but there’s some research related to frontend placement and routing, as well as DB & deployment responsibilities that are not able to be spread across all teammates.

Option 2: AWS
<\/strong>+ Well communicated Free Tier options
+ Cloud DB has options for both NoSQL and SQL
+ Cloud DB means all team members can help with data setup, debugging, connections, etc.
+ Multiple deployment options
+ CI\/CD functionality available
– High learning curve, too many options
– EC2 instance deployment requires setting up nginx for server proxy for incoming traffic, what a pain — also if we are using EC2, we are literally just provisioning a machine to host the entire application — how is this different\/more beneficial than FLIP other than guaranteed uptime?
– Alternatively can setup EC2 for backend, S3 bucket\/Cloudfront for frontend,
– Security everywhere means many places for possible error in just “getting setup”
– Using serverless backend (e.g. lambda) or amplify frontend doesn’t even feel like real code, what is this drag and drop programming stuff about
– Creating initial architecture requires further research

Summary: many options are available which requires greater startup cost in research. But, after the initial (possibly painful) setup — all the pieces are made to work with each other seamlessly. Generous free tier means unlikely to incur costs, but need to be judicious with the fine print.

Option 3: GCP
<\/strong>Mostly same as AWS services but with these additions:
+ Greater emphasis on containerized deployment makes “works here works everywhere” easy
– no free-tier SQL cloud DB (free tier is NoSQL only)

Summary: higher research as with AWS but seems to have friendlier containerized option via Cloud Run service. Although initial setup cost could be higher, if a docker container can be setup appropriately it is basically guaranteed to work on all team machines AND for deployment.

Note: I recognize I am a neophyte and many parts of this could be (completely?) incorrect. I accept that and wave my Student ID in return. This was one week’s research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Goal Identify and evaluate viability of hosting and deployment options for application considering research costs versus mid-term benefits. Background Part of my research this week has been looking into various hosting options. There’s a few components involved here. The primary is going to be physically how\/where to host our full stack application. The second is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12710,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12710"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/dansarran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}