Investigate alternative deployment platforms

[philipbelesky]

Now that the Google Cloud Platform has a PostgreSQL option it might be worth whether it's a viable option to supplement heroku. From what I recall App Engine has good Django support and there is a generous free trial / free quota.

EDIT/update: this is now a general tracking issue for non-Heroku based deployment options.

[philipbelesky]

Summary of some research:

• Azure offers a one-click deploy button; however it seems the 'free tier' essentially just provides $200 credit for a month. After that I assume the app no longer works
• AWS doesn't seem to provide a one-click deploy button; and the the free credit expires after a year
• Open Shift offers a one-click deploy button and a free tier that is lasting, however has reasonably severe usage limits
• Google App engine doesn't seem to have a one click deploy button but does seem to have a relative generous free quota. Possibly might need some rearchitecting to use google's db service over postgres. Possibly has a 1-click equivalent if we want package the app up for the Cloud Launcher somehow?
• Scalingo has a button; and a 30 day free trial. Unclear what happens to existing instances when the trial expires; assume the site vanishes.
• Jelastic has a button; and a 14 day free trial. Unclear what happens to existing instances when the trial expires; assume the site vanishes.
• As a totally different ball game: AWS allows you to create Marketplace apps that are then deployed to their infrastructure (and that you can charge users to use; unclear who pays for the resource use?; unclear how this works with the free credit AWS provides?). This could actually be an interesting way to offer a kind of centralised-decentralised hybrid approach to hosting Tabbycat.

If we want to diversify from Heroku it looks like we are going to have to give up on at least one: deployment ease; persistence; and free pricing.

[tienne-B]

Had a chat with @theonlyjohnny (who may elaborate if he wishes) who operates the @zeet-co platform about his platform as an alternative. They are currently investigating the deployment using Docker Compose. Awaiting that, their model is with a flat monthly fee for sites, but resources would not be an issue for the users. An idea that was brought up was that Tabbycat could use their API to deploy sites in the place of users (and so payment would fall to Tabbycat), and through that add credentials for email. The little hitch would be in data retention as the database would have a monthly fee, unlike through Heroku.

[philipbelesky]

That sounds great, and having more SASS-style platforms would be great. For the purposes of resolving this issue, the original intent for this issue was to find a similarly decentralised platform to Heroku which I think would always be desirable as an option; particularly if Heroku no longer was.