Ask HN: Where do you deploy to in 2018 and how?

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

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

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

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.

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

In general all my deploys are done using Travis CI.

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).

[1]: https://flynn.io

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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