Deployment?

[nelsonic]

I've been very disappointed with Fly.io and their handling of the server that ran both our Auth and MVP#449 apps (specifically how they killed our Postgres and lost our data!! 😢) so I've been investigating alternatives for the last few months in my "off" hours. Now that I'm done with the contract I can get back into this. 🤞

We need to re-deploy the MVP and Postgres ASAP to something more reliable and have monitoring for it. 🚀
We've used several Cloud/VPS providers in the past and have had varying degrees of bad to good experience. 👍 👎
I don't want to use any of the "Majors" (AWS, CCP, etc.) for deploying the MVP, Auth or App
because the costs and complexity will be silly. 💸 🔥
We want a low-cost but highly available/reliable/secure environment where we can easily deploy an app in seconds.

To be 100% clear: I would much rather be doing something else right now! 🙃
If connecting a Fly.io instance to the DigitalOcean Managed Postgres worked we would already be doing that! ⏳
The Fly.io platform is good for running Apps and especially good for Elixir/Phoenix Apps because Chris works there and they want it to be the best PaaS for Phoenix.
But for whatever reason they don't want to do managed Postgres which is bonkers because Phoenix is basically only a toy without Postgres! 🤦‍♂️

So ...

I have to spend the next couple of hours (days?) figuring out how we are going to ultra-reliably deploy and monitor our Apps.

[MikeRund]

Railway offers built in Postgres support and claims streamlined deployment, instant development, easy scaling with built in observability.
It seems to have usage-based billing model, which this article seems to like but has caused some confusion in this thread. Not sure if this was one of the mentioned "tried" providers.

[nelsonic]

@MikeRund Railway is an attractive <option> in terms of features ✨

but not in terms of price: https://railway.app/pricing 💸

What they are offering is streamlining not affordability. It's like Heroku, Fly.io, Netlify, Vercel etc.

If you take a read of: https://docs.railway.app/guides/postgresql#high-availability-postgresql-cluster
you'll see that the Postgres setup on Railway doesn't have backups/replication, same as Fly.io 🙃

If we're going to have to setup/manage our own backups, might as well do it on an IaaS that actually owns the hardware and thus charges a small fraction of the price for the resources including egress (bandwidth) costs.

I'm currently considering using Kamal: dwyl/learn-devops#96 after spending the last few days looking at k3s/k8s: dwyl/learn-devops#99 and postgresql-cluster.org dwyl/learn-postgresql#114 for the DB.

All hosted on Hetzner dwyl/learn-devops#97 for 1/10 the cost of any PaaS.

I'm predicting our total cost to run an HA Postgres Cluster (3 nodes) and All our Elixir/Phoenix Apps will be €24/month
with continuous deployment from GitHub Actions and most of the benefits we had on Fly.io. 💭

The lame thing is having to implement and document all of this. ⏳
But hopefully won't take forever ... 🤞