SPIKE: Hosting/Infrastructure

Three primary options/Overview:

AWS
- We all qualify for $100 of AWS credit per year as UT Dallas students and we could each have our own copy of the website on our AWS account for local testing
- We can use Terraform or AWS CloudFormation (IaC - Instructure as Code software/tools) to build out the configuration of our infrastructure on AWS and make it easily deployable on any of our accounts (no need to manually go in and setup API Gateway, DynamoDB, etc.)
Netlify
- We used Netlify on ResumeBook and it was fairly easy to use and setup. It's free however it seems they are getting starting to limit more features to incentivize people to upgrade to the paid plans
GCP/Firebase
- GCP offers a lot of free services and would also make for a good alternative to AWS. We already have the database for ResumeBook hosted there

Pros/Cons of each option

AWS:

Pros:
- Widely used in the industry, some of our team members have familiarity with it
- Lots of cool features and services available for us to use
Cons:
- Transferring the AWS account to the next officer might be challenging. Solutions:
  1. DynamoDB is free so we can have the SHPE gmail account host our production dynamodb database and use terraform to define our infrastructure, making it easily transferrable (to the next tech officer's AWS Educate account)
  2. Use Firebase as a database, making it so we don't need to worry about difficulties transferring access in the future. This might make our database calls somewhat slower as Firebase wouldn't be on-prem (On AWS' network), however we've already been doing this with ResumeBook.

Netlify:

Pros:
- The team already has familiarity with it and deploying is fairly simple.
Cons:
- Not as much opportunity to learn technologies more heavily used in the industry
- Uncertainty about the free plan in the future -> I need to do more investigation into this

GCP/Firebase:

Pros:
- GCP has a lot of free services we can use and may possibly make it much easier to transfer ownership of these projects to the next technology officer
- We already use Firebase for our database on ResumeBook, may be easier to keep everything on one service.
Cons:
- Starting sometime in 2021 Firebase will require a credit card to be on file for the free plan -> Not sure if there is a way to set a spending cap of $0/shut off service if it exceeds the free tier.
- While GCP is still widely used in the industry and a lot of the concepts for the different services are transferrable between cloud providers, AWS is definitely still the top cloud provider in the industry as it stands right now. Learning AWS may be more beneficial for our members than GCP.

SHPE-UTDallas / Website-Redesign