
Ask HN: What is your favorite deployment/hosting choices for Rails 5? - wuliwong
We are looking to move a Rails 5 application (as well as a Django app) from Heroku to either AWS or Google Cloud. My knee jerk plan was to host on AWS but I wasn&#x27;t sure about a deployment&#x2F;development &quot;strategy&quot; (ie. Kubernetes). I&#x27;ve also been told Google Cloud might be cheaper depending on our requirements. I was given a little tour of Google Cloud by a friend who uses it and at least during that quick overview GC seemed a bit easier to use than AWS. That is important to me as I am not a devops guru by any stretch of the imagination.
======
excid3
I've been working on a solution for deploying Rails called Hatchbox.
([https://hatchbox.io](https://hatchbox.io)) Basically wanted to offer
something as easy to deploy as Heroku, but on your own servers so you could
host on DigitalOcean, AWS, etc. A lot of people have been deploying 50%
cheaper than their Heroku bills which is fantastic.

Feel free to email me, chris@gorails.com if you have any questions or want to
chat and see if it'd be a good solution for you!

~~~
geetfun
Unaffiliated with Hatchbox. +1 for the ease of use and reliability.

~~~
excid3
Appreciate that! :D

------
ezekg
Why do you want to move off Heroku? If you're not a devops guru, then you will
likely spend more time (and money) on ops-related work if you do end up
moving, especially when things go wrong. Have you factored that workload into
your costs? Heroku is kind of your devops guy, in this case, and it's the
premium you're paying Heroku for. If you move to something like AWS or GCP,
you may need to fill that void you've created with a real person, especially
if you start going with something like k8s. Just something to think about.

------
schappim
You might want to try Elastic Beanstalk (AWS's platform as a service) in
combination with Deploybot ([https://deploybot.com/](https://deploybot.com/)).

Deploybot will allow you to do "git push style" deploys similar to Heroku.

As a "not a devops guru" myself, this combination has served me very well in
serving Rails and Sinatra apps.

Edit: If I were based in the the US (I'm in Australia) I would use Heroku.
Unfortunately you can't get Heroku in an Australian DC without going on a
crazy huge enterprise plan.

------
dysonsphere
> I was given a little tour of Google Cloud by a friend who uses it and at
> least during that quick overview GC seemed a bit easier to use than AWS

this sounds a bit far-fetched to me depending upon the expertise of your
friend on both the platforms, he might be more experienced on GCP but not so
much on AWS. Anyways my point is devops, in general, is platform agnostic,
unless you are going all in on a single provider you can even mix and match
few things. As mentioned by many devops gurus, Docker is the absolute must
when it comes to things like microservices and devops stuff. I would suggest
you compare the two platforms as per your convenience(pricing, brand
association etc) then go ahead and deploy your app (monolithic or bundle of
microservices) as Docker containers first. Do not worry about scaling at the
beginning. Once you get some comfort level on managing your Docker containers
you have to move towards automation culture that is the deployments can be
done with an automated build pipeline for that naturally as a next step you
must use Docker swarm. This process would expose you to the world of devops
and microservices/serverless architectures etc. Then you can as a replacement
to Docker swarm can try and play with Apache Mesos or kubernetes.

~~~
wuliwong
I was saying this from my perspective. I was comparing what I saw on GC to my
past experience with AWS. I have some experience using AWS in the past and it
has always been super confusing to me. The other day was my first experience
looking at the google cloud platform and it seemed much simpler to understand.
But again, this was just a very superficial overview.

------
sztwiorok
Deployment + Hosting: Amazon ElasticBeanstalk, Google App Engine, Azure App
Service, Heroku

Deployment Tool: Buddy [https://buddy.works](https://buddy.works)

Hosting: Amazon EC2, Digital Ocean
[https://www.digitalocean.com/](https://www.digitalocean.com/) , Vultr
[https://www.vultr.com/](https://www.vultr.com/) , Azure VM, Google Compute
Engine

------
quantummkv
> That is important to me as I am not a devops guru by any stretch of the
> imagination.

Go for AWS then. The amount and quality of tutorials, guides and the size of
the community is leaps and bounds over Google Cloud. Very useful if you are
new to all this.

Btw, for some small/medium scale projects that I have done, I deployed them on
DigitalOcean. It's quick and easy compared to everything else. Unless you are
running something large scale, you might want to consider DigitalOcean.

~~~
wuliwong
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks.

------
noahc
Have you worked with Heroku to lower your bill?

~~~
wuliwong
I have not. You have done this before?

~~~
noahc
Yeah. I think you need a corporate account though. Do you have metrics in
place to see if you can improve performance? Have you played with dyno
resizing based on load or time?

