Anyone using AWS?
I avoided aws and spend time doing things by hand using digitalocean, because of its pricing. But now aws has amplify and lightsail which I think might be a good (cheaper) and solid solution as it make it easy to do ci/cd and deployment.
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AWS is great if you want to configure, customize, and manage everything yourself/manually. I would definitely checkout https://render.com/
I've put up a couple servers now and its amazing how easy it is.
Big fan of Render myself. I was told about it when I first started building Amezmo. One difference between Amezmo and Render is that Render is more of a generic cloud. I would recommend you try Amezmo is your're hosting PHP apps.
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Lol, stop trolling, buddy :)
DO is cheaper.
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No haven't tried docker yet, although I know its possible.
This is precisely why I tried render. Just like you said AWS is way to involved for a small project/app.
Lightsail is just like a DO droplet, but worse performance for the same money. I'd say either stick with DO or use the parts of AWS that Digital Ocean doesn't offer yet!
Yeah, we looked into lightsail but chose to stick with droplets for similar reasons.
EC2 is bloody expensive: if you need only a server, use netcup.de or hetzner.de, go for AWS if you want to leverage its service ecosystem (even in that case, you can still avoid the over-priced EC2)
This exactly.
I use amplify for most of my projects and it has been great. My monthly costs have always stayed in the single digits while I have experimented with many ideas. Let me know if you have any questions. I would highly recommend it.
If I had to start over I would go with Amplify from the beginning! The documentation overload on AWS is incredible.
Agreed. Their documentation could use a little work.
There are too many services on aws. Every time i use aws, I feel like swimming in the ocean of doc. If u are an indie hacker, I suggest u stick with the simplest option, heroku / DO. On DO, u may still spend time with docker. I find myself spend a long time learning and testing with different docker image.
If you are starting, u can try heroku. I want to remove myself from devops. So I think heroku may save my time on server. I just want to focus on dev work to maximize my output
I setup my docker once and never look back, it just sit in my DO docker's image, $5 a month. When you say you spend time configuring docker what you actually do?
I use DigitalOceand Firebase hosting (+cloud functions) for GoWFH.com and TripFate.com
What I love about Firebase is their free tier, which is more than sufficient if you're just getting started.
We use both AWS and Digital Ocean at www.surveydatahub.com. I find that both of them are pretty good for what we need. We've split out our architecture among both providers but have been thinking about consolidating it all on AWS. I wasn't aware that lightsail was cheaper than digital ocean.
The only good service from AWS for my personal use would be S3. Currently I don't use AWS though.
My two reasons:
I am at Digital Ocean currently and have all I need.
I used AWS, Azure and Firebase. Firebase is the easiest and my favorite. Azure is the most feature rich. For my enterprise apps I mostly decided Azure(because someone else paying).
AWS is complicated compared to Firebase, even Azure is slightly better than AWS.
But I am using AWS for my new project because they gave a $1000 credit and storage is cheap on AWS compared to Firebase. Btw, DO spaces are dead cheap compared to AWS S3.
Try it, is great!! You can manage everything, we use it on our project.
I stopped developing about ten years ago to work for a big co. For "political reasons" we can't use AWS at the big co. Now I'm looking into AWS in my free time and I'm astonished how much time AWS can save you if you have the scalability, stability and compliance requirements of a big company. We have entire teams dedicated to features you can just enable with a check-box click in AWS.
Now why would this be relevant for a startup? If you want to sell to a big company, they are going to give you questionaires asking about all these compliance issues, and just being on AWS will help you tremendously in answering "fully compliant" to a lot of them.
Might be a little late here, came across this while researching GCP vs AWS.
Would you say that remaining fully compliant is something standard across the three major cloud providers (Azure/AWS/GCP)? I’m guessing where it gets iffy is the newer or younger companies that offer the same services.
tl;dr I traveled from DO, Lightsail, EC2, Render, and finally end up in Google Cloud Platform- GAE for Nodejs, GCE for Redis, Firebase for React client app.
So here is the long story about that journey...: I started with DO because it got mentioned here a lot. But realized its Space couldn't host my React app.
Went to Lightsail because it was similar to DO and I can apply DO's fantastic guides on virtual machine over there too. Plus it has the whole ecosystem(mainly Cloudfront and S3) to bring up my app as well as cheaper than DO in terms of storage and bandwidth. Then realized the managed Postgresql in Lightsail was gonna be a pretty high fixed cost for me before I even get any customers.
Then, I tried exploring EC2, Amplify, Beanstalk, etc... At this point, I'd had it with AWS. It's just too much info for me to process to do one simple thing. And its doc was super long winded without making me feel like I was progressing at all.
Then I explored Render.com coz a few sing its song here. But it was too expensive for me for the amount of bandwidth/storage I get relative to other big players.
Then a friend told me about GCP....at this point I'm already sick of devops stuff, I just wanted to host my boring DB, server, and JS files ffs... Anyway, I take a look, and wow..its doc is well organized, easy to the eyes, it's linear, it has plenty of code examples along the way, it has a straightforward guide to bring up my goddamn nodejs. I host my Nodejs in GAE which is serverless. No more installing and configuring tons of stuff like you do on a VM. It's cheaper too(I think). GCP has generous subsidies too coz it's competing for market share. And Firebase was perfect for hosting react. They both work well together. I never looked back at AWS again. Thank god.
can't you host react and node app using DO's ubuntu droplet? What's the problem?
I actually did host react in droplet, but hooking it to a CDN wasn't clear to me and seemed long-winded, so I decided against it and do it the more 'standard' way..(the cloudfront and S3 combo for example).
you need a CDN for a side project? I'm even thinking skipping SSL before I reach 1k users.
AWS is what I use at my full time job. By using the same tech in my indie hacking I can reuse that knowledge and possibly benefit my company by learning new things on the side.
We at https://www.horizontech.dev, a Firebase shop. Most of our students' projects are built using it.
Hosting, Storage, Database, Compute is available in Firebase for a simple app or website. Of course, if you go beyond that you can rely on GCP.
That doesn't mean I recommend GCP.
which part you prefer gcp over aws? I thought aws has more feature than gcp?
Well aws does have more features than GCP but the question is do we need those ?
Like cloud run and firestore in gcp. There is no directly services in aws for those.
Switched to AWS for www.probstack.io and it's super handy I feel.. Used Digital ocean as well for www.howsitlike.com but don't see much of a diff. in pricing as of now..
aws is also great if you run more than one website. I host them on k8s cluster which runs on 2 EC2 machines atm. but can add more when I expand.
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I use AWS and I love it, but I wouldn't recommend it for other indie hackers. it is way too complex and complicated. I only chose it to have it as a skill on my CV. If you just want to get stuff done and don't want to spend a year learning AWS use something like netlify + heroku/digital ocean.
Granted I don't use amplify, I use CDK, but also a 100% serverless stack
+1 for this, after hundreds and hundreds of hours of gathering material and reading (lot of great nuggets), this is the one doc/site that brings a full product all together for the common person with energy and stamina. Really, first class. I went ahead and sponsored them soon after finding.
actually, serverless is a little bit overkilled for a saas app, unless you have over 10 people engineering team. It's like it's really not worth it to develop in microservice for a freelance project.
serverless is not synonymous with microservices. You can build a monolith just as easily. It just depends on your use case whether you need to run a server or not.
I would agree with @badfun. Depending on your use case, a severless architecture should be much less overhead.
The entire point of serverless architecture is to abstract away common devops concerns. In a well structured scenario it would mean you can do more with less engineers.
wow thanks for this resource!