
Ask HN: Where do you deploy to in 2018 and how? - Narzerus
I&#x27;ve been using Heroku for several years now, and as it happens to everyone eventually it becomes just too expensive.<p>I&#x27;m curious to know what people here use to deploy, and where are you hosting your apps.<p>Personally I&#x27;m looking for an experience as similar as possible to Heroku, any recommendations?
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wastedhours
Most of my projects are Rails-based, and I tend to use DO [0], and have just
discovered Hatchbox [1] to deploy. Super easy for side-projects to get started
and deployed. Taken deploying side projects from days to minutes.

[0] [https://www.digitalocean.com/](https://www.digitalocean.com/)

[1] [https://www.hatchbox.io/](https://www.hatchbox.io/)

~~~
excid3
Creator of Hatchbox.io here! I was surprised to see this on here, which is
awesome. Let me know if you have any questions. Happy to help!

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PerfectElement
I do things in an old-school way. 2 Bare metal servers at different data
centers with totaluptime.com acting as a load balancer with auto-failover.

Deployment is done via SFTP by pressing the publish button in Visual Studio.
This will deploy to the inactive server. I then manually trigger tests on
GhostInspector (this could be automated via API) to make sure I didn't break
anything. Then I run a custom script to make the load balancer redirect
traffic to the upgraded server.

Solo founder, small bootstrapped business generating 50k/month with 1000
paying customers. Hosting costs are under $500. I could double the number of
clients without needing to upgrade the hardware. I looked into moving to AWS
or Azure, but can't justify paying 4x more for the same performance.

~~~
rsto
Thanks for sharing, I'm considering bare metal as well for a project. Is
latency between the two data centers an issue for you, e.g. is one of your two
servers running a SQL database as master?

~~~
PerfectElement
Right, I replicate the database. Latency hasn't been a problem for our volume.
During our peak hours we get 30 requests/second, so it's pretty manageable.

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ah-
Kubernetes, both in-house and on AWS. I couldn't live without it anymore, it's
just so nice to use and easy once you've gotten over the initial learning
curve.

kubectl apply -f for simple deployments, Helm for more complex ones.

~~~
KurtMueller
What services on AWS do you use with Kubernetes? Any good resources re: Kube
and AWS?

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pentium10
Google Cloud Platform - their PaaS or serverless solutions are extremely
cheap. Also having 1TB free query on Bigquery is a true hidden gem in cloud.
The same instance compared to other cloud vendors have better performance. We
always needed fewer workers on GCP compared to AWS for example.

~~~
juicy-fruit
I also prefer GCP over AWS. GCP has better documentation, better UI and UX,
better console and just overall more friendly.

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sheraz
Easy offboarding from Heroku into dokku [1] and digital ocean [2].

But these days I run simple docker in digital ocean and Azure with deployments
managed via my CI.

[1] - [http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/](http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/)

[2] - [https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-
apps/dokku/](https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/dokku/)

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ukoki
I'm surprised how many people here are snow-flaking their own web application
servers instead of just using Heroku. Heroku is $25/dyno/month. At $100/hr for
a dev a Heroku dyno costs 15minutes of dev time per month. If you spend just a
day tinkering with your application server VMs or updating docker images
running your Rails app every month — you could have bought 32 Heroku dynos
instead.

~~~
andrei_says_
Well you usually need at least two-three dynos plus a database. This takes the
price to $100-$125 / mo which is still a good savings over hiring a sysadmin.

But some services provide a good subset of heroku functionality on your own
servers for a flat fee which is where I think the sweet spot is now.

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gameswithgo
Azure app service, deploy to it with MSBuild (which we fire off from teamcity,
which git clones, runs build scripts, then deploys with msbuild). App services
have a 'staging' deployment slot, so you can deploy to the staging slot, test
it, then swap the slots and you are live.

App Services are cheap and easy to manage, if you write efficient code they
have plenty of horsepower for medium sized websites.

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bpicolo
What parts of Heroku in particular are you interested in seeing in an
alternative? If a friendly user interface is a big part of the ask, your
options are unfortunately limited (at least among the big cloud providers, I'm
unfamiliar with smaller providers).

AWS's Elastic Beanstalk doesn't have any UX to speak of (just a few options to
fiddle and some weak logging support). It's a very raw service, much like the
rest of AWS (rock-solid infrastructure to bring-your-own stuff). They take
care of infrastructure but developer pleasantries are entirely up to you.

App Engine is significantly better on the UX front - you get error reporting,
metrics, logging, etc all in a single cohesive web app. In my experience I hit
some hard to debug / resolve quirks, but that is very much a ymmv situation.
It can be tricky to figure out how to configure the right pieces / permissions
in their new app engine variant (docker-based). I wouldn't use the classic
variant at this point, it's pretty heavy on the vendor lock-in front. It's
great if you need the specific capability of classic app engine but that's
most likely not what you need.

If you're using Heroku's hosted postgres, know that GCloud's postgres support
is still "beta". AWS RDS on the other hand has very good postgres support.

In both cases, deploys aren't just a git push, but use a custom CLI (`eb
deploy` and `gcloud something something`). They're also both pretty typically
tough to get to the first successful deploy with - for example Elastic
Beanstalk will spend quite a while attempting to recover from deployment
errors, and if you've never deployed a successful version it's very bad at
that, and it also blocks deployments while it attempts to recover. So you end
up stuck while it attempts to recover from a problem it will never recover
from for a bit (this has been a problem for literally every beanstalk service
I've ever deployed, heh).

You can also go something like the hosted Kubernetes route. Currently GCloud
is king here, but naturally that's a command-line only UX unless you deploy
your own kubernetes UI service (unfamiliar with options there)

Unfamiliar with Azure's offerings.

------
chrisvalleybay
AWS, mostly. On my servers I have simple shell scripts that have functions for
pulling and running Docker images. Locally I use rake to build and push Docker
images. Finally, Rake executes the deploy script on the server via ssh which
pulls and runs the new images.

It's not fancy like dokku (or even Docker Compose), but it's composed of very
minor pieces that are easy to debug and extend.

Not knowing if Docker Compose has executed successfully, and if I'm on the
newest image or not, grew to be an extra todo in my checklist when debugging
my applications.

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vlucas
I was in the exact same position as you, looking at paying over $100/mo for a
simple side project on Heroku. I wound up deploying it to my own VPS for
$5-10/mo instead, and it actually ran faster was was much more reliable.

I am working on turning this into an app that others can use too. It's still a
ways away from real production use, but I am close to a closed beta. If you're
interested, check it out:

[https://www.seamless.cloud/](https://www.seamless.cloud/)

------
MrMatt
Flynn [1] is worth a look (having come from dokku). Heroku-like and runs as a
cluster.

[1]: [https://flynn.io](https://flynn.io)

~~~
corobo
Are they still knocking about? They used to do a weekly blog post but nothing
since March 2017

------
arooaroo
I know this post is young but surprised not to see Linode on here yet. We are
deploying to Linode and have recently switched from Puppet to Saltstack to
manage our servers. There's a bit of Fabric and Capistrano to glue it all
together.

~~~
random42_
How does Linode compares to DigitalOcean? I see that at least price wise
DigitalOcean looks cheaper.

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uhsac
Take a look at [https://nanobox.io/](https://nanobox.io/), I'm using it for
side projects and it's great and cheap (I'm not related to them)

~~~
uhsac
Also the dev experience that it give is awesome

------
neikos
I use the hetzner cloud[1] that has been recently launched. It is pretty fast
and not too expensive.

[1]: [https://www.hetzner.de/cloud](https://www.hetzner.de/cloud)

------
pier25
We've bee using a mix of Heroku and Firebase for static hosting.

Lately we've been moving small services to cloud functions in order to shut
down Heroku dynos and it's been great so far.

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paulgb
If you like the Heroku user experience you might like the Serverless
Framework[1] as a front-end to AWS Lambda. In my case the app that I was
deploying was already a WSGI Twelve-Factor app[2] so I created a yaml file and
deployment just worked.

[1] [https://serverless.com/](https://serverless.com/) [2]
[https://12factor.net/](https://12factor.net/)

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ejs
I continue to use Heroku for a few applications. Since the last few
application I have worked on are B2B apps they don't get much usage in the
off-hours. I wrote a heroku-addon[1] for scaling down on nights/weekends so
the cost isn't bad overall.

[1]
[https://elements.heroku.com/addons/flightformation](https://elements.heroku.com/addons/flightformation)

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matthewmacleod
At present, we use a network of bare-metal servers, which are managed by Chef,
with a custom deployment system which deploys build artefacts from CI as
defined in Chef. It's tidy, smart and quick – but it does require a fair bit
of infrastructure.

We're in the middle of piloting a switch to Nomad
([https://www.hashicorp.com/products/nomad](https://www.hashicorp.com/products/nomad)),
replacing much of the custom deployment system with it, though still running
on bare-metal servers. It's an absolutely _fabulous_ bit of software that
really hits the use-cases for an organisation of our size, so I'm excited to
see how that works out.

For side-projects where things like HA aren't much of a concern, I've settled
on some minimal shell scripts to deploy tarballs over SSH. It's actually
pretty neat – CI builds a project, and runs a small script to copy the results
to a server and restart the services. It's always worth considering the simple
solutions if you don't need the more advanced features!

------
majewsky
I know it's not useful for you, but: In our own datacenters, using Kubernetes
on baremetal.

~~~
cpursley
I'm looking into this. How and how difficult is it to get K8 onto baremetal?
Could you point me towards tooling and best practices for running K8 on
baremetal?

~~~
majewsky
The short answer is: It's pretty ugly. I don't know the details, but we PXE-
boot and install CoreOS, then run kubelet using rkt (using a systemd service).
The other k8s components (etcd, apiserver, controller manager etc.) are
managed by the kubelet using static manifests. Persistent volumes are backed
by a separate storage appliance via NFS.

Our team built this entire process ~2 years ago, when we started using k8s. We
would probably use some off-the-shelf parts today, but practically nothing
existed back then.

------
tobru
I can recommend APPUiO [0] which is a Swiss based container platform running
OpenShift [1] and providing a full PaaS experience. The crew is reachable
under [2], answering any questions in the chat. Disclaimer: I work for VSHN,
the company behind APPUiO.

[0] [https://appuio.ch/en/public.html](https://appuio.ch/en/public.html) [1]
[https://www.openshift.org/](https://www.openshift.org/) [2]
[https://community.appuio.ch/](https://community.appuio.ch/)

------
michaelbuckbee
In making a selection like this you need to separate the deploy UX (git push
heroku master) from the underlying service.

Things like dokku, etc are great at providing the UX and generally really
solid.

However, much of the benefit of Heroku is that they handle some/much of the
underlying sysadmin tasks you'd otherwise need to worry about. It's easy to
discount that as it's mostly invisible until there's a serious problem.

A middle ground between putting dokku onto a VPS is perhaps Amazon's Elastic
Beanstalk service combined with Amazon RDS which provides you a big chunk of
the functionality (albeit in a less slick wrapper).

------
joshmanders
I used to think Heroku was too expensive, and I set out to build a service as
comparable to Heroku but using more open source stuff to bring costs down,
including bringing the friendly heroku interface to your own servers, so it
didn't matter if you had 1 server or 30 servers, you'd pay a single small
fee.. I even became a maintainer of Dokku in my time of getting very familiar
and contributing to it's plugins and core while building my service.

Then I realized Heroku really isn't that expensive anymore, and I dropped it
all and started building my projects on Heroku again.

------
bergie
Heroku and AWS, depending on application. Heroku is a bit pricey, yes, but on
the other hand they've provided really good service over the years.

In general all my deploys are done using Travis CI.

------
ecesena
Work: AWS.

Personal projects: Github pages (mostly react apps, e.g. [1, 2]), GAE (python
backends, e.g. [1]), Google Spreadsheet (data backend, e.g. [2]), Firebase
(e.g., [3]).

[1] [http://priceeth.github.io/](http://priceeth.github.io/)

[2] [http://hasgluten.com/](http://hasgluten.com/)

[3] [http://distrosheet.com/](http://distrosheet.com/)

------
rwieruch
I use DO Droplets (5$ - 10$) to host multiple static websites with server
blocks or multiple applications (Node.js) with Dokku. So far, it has worked
out for me very well. If you are interested in Dokko, you can find a guide for
my setup over here [0].

\- [0] [https://www.robinwieruch.de/deploy-applications-digital-
ocea...](https://www.robinwieruch.de/deploy-applications-digital-ocean/)

------
nleach
Mesos running on AWS, almost entirely with EC2 spot instances.

We were big Heroku users as well, so carried over a number of Heroku patterns.
For example, configuring everything with ENV vars, lightweight load balancing,
grouping apps into several deployable targets, etc.

It’s certainly not better than Heroku in most ways, though there was no
plausible way for us to continue running our workload on Heroku.

(Edited: typo)

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acutesoftware
As a sole developer, I have the luxury of keeping it simple - git push and if
the tests pass, then ftp's to www.pythonanywhere.com

------
timwis
I just listened to the web platform podcast [0] episode about WeDeploy [1].
Haven't tried it yet, but it sounds really nice.

[0]:
[https://thewebplatformpodcast.com/155-wedeploy](https://thewebplatformpodcast.com/155-wedeploy)

[1]: [https://wedeploy.com/](https://wedeploy.com/)

------
praveenweb
If you like the git push flow of Heroku, i would recommend you to check out
Hasura - [https://hasura.io](https://hasura.io) \- Its a Baas + Paas for
containers. Everything about your project is declarative and your apps are
dockerized and deployed on to a Kubernetes cluster with free SSL.

------
underyx
Heh, nice timing with this question! We just published an article on how we
deploy at Kiwi.com (to Rancher) yesterday: [https://code.kiwi.com/announcing-
crane-e8ce911b187b](https://code.kiwi.com/announcing-crane-e8ce911b187b)

~~~
igammarays
Ugh, this level of abstraction is dizzying. Now you telling me I need Crane to
deploy to Rancher to manage Kubernetes to orchestrate Docker containers to run
my app?

~~~
underyx
Well, almost. We don't use Kubernetes, but Cattle (which is part of Rancher.)

I don't entirely understand your point though; is our level of abstraction too
low? With Heroku (preference of the OP) all of this, the containerization, the
orchestration, the deploy tool, is abstracted away. Is that what you'd prefer?

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yamalight
Have been rolling my own server on Scaleway / Hetzner and deploying with
Exoframe [1] for past ~year. Works pretty well :)

[1]
[https://github.com/exoframejs/exoframe](https://github.com/exoframejs/exoframe)

------
mariushop
Past AWS. Now Digital Ocean, happy customer, administrating
[https://eddtor.com](https://eddtor.com) (free) +
[http://memoria.email](http://memoria.email) front page

------
mark-ruwt
Our API Infrastructure (~40 servers) is spread across Linode, DigitalOcean,
and Vultr. We use home-rolled scripts to build machines from scratch
(aggressively tear down and rebuild to avoid maintenance windows), and use
Ansible to deploy any code updates.

------
tty7
personal heroku/dokku clone, which is really just a remote git with some hooks
that build images and provision to docker.

haproxy in front loadbalancing and doing routing

tinc mesh for a ghetto private cloud with dirt cheap boxes

consul k/v store used for runtime configuration

------
AndrewZM
Using vultr.com for a few side projects. I'm planning to release an iOS app
with a NodeJS and PostgreSQL backend. I find it to be somehow cheaper than DO
but cannot say anything about the reliability.

------
neverminder
I have a simple bash script that uses git, rsync and build tool for my stack
(sbt). Builds and deploys my project to any (linux) server on the planet with
ssh access. Simple, fast, effective and painless.

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hashkb
Some AMIs built with Packer, auto scaling groups, ELBs, CloudFront, Jenkins,
RDS, Elasticache, and some scripts in the repo. I build simple apps; if they
got crazier I might use a cloud managed k8s.

------
Jean-Philipe
Try `now` from [https://zeit.co](https://zeit.co), it's super pleasant. Hacker
friendly. Though, mostly nodejs centered (AFAIK).

~~~
sergiodxa
It supports Dockerfile so you can deploy any backend technology using Docker
containers, not only Node.js

------
girvo
Dokku, running on an HP DM1 laptop in my cupboard. My ISP gives me a static IP
and 100/100mb connection, so it’s quite good for my personal projects and some
work tooling!

------
adzicg
We switched MindMup from Heroku to AWS Lambda (+S3+Cloudfront for web page
hosting), gradually in 2016, and I’m quite happy with the results. We deploy
using claudia.js.

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marcfowler
We use Ansible for everything, deploying into AWS. It's really great and I
found it to be far easier to wrap my head around than anything else I looked
at.

------
hoppyluke
Azure App Service, deployed via Visual Studio Team Services. App Service
supports Git push deployments, but VSTS plays nicely with it (as you'd hope).

------
AustinG08
Using AWS CodePipeline (Github -> AWS CodeBuild -> AWS CodeDeploy). It works
nicely with all of our AWS resources. Looking to migrate to Kubernetes.

------
dudul
Docker managed by Kubernetes and deployed in AWS.

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neurostimulant
Rancher is actually pretty solid. The API is actually pretty good, allowing me
to write some automation scripts for everyday tasks.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Dedicated servers colocated in town, via shell scripts, libvirt, and an in-
house continuous integration service.

------
superkitty
Mesosphere DC/OS, AWS, ECS, EKS, EC2, cloudformation, Jenkins, deployment API
developed at home grown...

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pawelkomarnicki
AWS, because we have to at work. Heroku for personal projects, because it's
easy and fuss-free :-)

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dfl__
aws lambda with aws-sam-local for serverless apps and aws s3 and cloudfront
for html/css/js frontend

For more heavier stuff I use cloudformation and to deploy docker images to ECS

The AWS-Stuff was a steep learning curve in the last months but worth it.

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jesses
If you're using Elixir, take a look at gigalixir.com I'm the founder.

~~~
danbee
+1 for Gigalixir! Jesse is super helpful too.

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nkristoffersen
Gitlab for CI/CD then deploy to AWS, Google Cloud, or Firebase hosting.

------
superkitty
What folks use for deployment strategy for machine learning based models?

------
tudelo
Manually deploying using scripts to RHEL virtual machines.

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danbee
Netlify is fantastic for deploying static sites.

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thecatspaw
we're using jenkins to deploy our monolithic java ecommerce applications onto
baremetal servers, now slowly moving to aws

------
krambs
surge.sh is stupid-simple for static sites.

~~~
potta_coffee
I love surge, it's been awesome.

------
segmondy
On my localhost. :-D

For a quick demo, on a DMZ raspberry pi.

------
savrajsingh
Google app engine

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kull
DigitalOcean

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nodelessness
Have you tried dokku?

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holydude
vmware guests with powershell and jenkins

