Hosting Bake Off, Database Infrastructure

[allisonsierra]

Digital Ocean

• Pros
  • Does have an App Platform like Heroku. $5/month per dynamic container, 3 static sites free. Problem: Does not look like a good option for DB so would either need managed DB (expensive) or DB running on VM anyway at which point why use their app platform?
  • Or we can roll our own infra (VM with RancherOS $5/month, Block Storage $0.10 GiB/month)
  • Floating IPs and Load Balancers are free
  • 500 MB container registry storage for free
  • Can manage DNS if we want (point NS records to DO)
  • Teams at no cost
  • Easy enough to create other environments
• Cons
  • A little more setup work on the infra side but Allie has done it with DO before so can get it going quick
  • Need to figure out our database strategy. They have managed Postgres but that starts at $15/month and is overkill for what we need (redundancy, etc). Container + Block Storage = cheap option

Heroku

• Pros
  • Free at the personal tier for both Dyno and managed Postgres
  • PaaS abstraction so opinionated build/deploy but not having to twiddle with infra bits
• Cons
  • By having a team you cannot get the free pricing. This means a minimum of $7/month for the dyno and $9/month for the DB ($16/month)
  • Gets expensive pretty quick
• Questions
  • How are environments supported?

Database Thoughts:

• I would like to understand how we are planning to manage DB changes, etc. Heroku might offer value here I'm not aware of.

Recommendation:

• I am leaning towards DigitalOcean right now. At $6/month for 1 VM (1 CPU, 1 GB RAM) and 10 GiB Block storage is less than half the cost of Heroku since we need a team. I also know it, and we really just need a typical container image builds

[allisonsierra]

Decision: We'll go with DigitalOcean. @amy-keibler will sort out the local database integration before we worry about deployment. Initial DB plan will be Postgres container with data on Block Storage Volume.