Decide where Current will be hosted

[aviflax]

The most obvious options off the top of my head:

• self-hosted by Arc90 on Arc’s prod web machines at EC2
• Heroku

@closacco @jimniels any other options you think we should consider?

[closacco]

Nope, those are the two obvious ones.

[aviflax]

OK, so off the top of my head:

Self-hosted

Pros

• Total flexibility
  • e.g. as to which DB we use (as in #2)
• If usage doesn’t take off, zero marginal cost
• Easy to migrate to any other infrastructure scenario which provides servers (as opposed to a PaaS)

Cons

• 100% manual deployment and operation (by default)
  • unless we use something like Puppet, Fabric, Grunt, Capistrano, etc, all deployment and ops tasks are 100% manual
• If usage takes off, scaling would be 100% manual
  • we’d have to manually launch new servers, deploy the components, configure replication, configure LBs, etc.

Heroku

Pros

• If usage doesn’t take off, zero marginal cost
• If usage takes off, scaling is fast, easy, and automated
• Deployment and other ops tasks are fast, easy, and automated
• Easy to migrate to any other infrastructure scenario which provides servers (as opposed to a PaaS)

Cons

• Less flexibility around technologies and architecture
  • e.g. WRT #2 we’d want to use PostgreSQL, as that’s the only DBMS Heroku really supports
  • they sort-of support other DBMS’s via “add-ons” but I’m quite suspicious of them — unless I’m mistaken the add-on servers could be running in a different datacenter from the app servers, which just seems like a non-starter to me
  • e.g. if we want to use a task queue, we’d have to choose from one of the supported add-ons
• If usage takes off, and we need to scale out, would probably cost more than self-hosting

I’m also casually interested in considering Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk and OpsWorks solutions as middle grounds between raw EC2 and Heroku, but I’m not sure it’d be worth the time investment.

Right now I’m leaning towards Heroku.

@closacco any thoughts on all this?

[closacco]

Right now I’m leaning towards Heroku.

+1.

[aviflax]

I’ve spoken with two Heroku staffers and they’ve convinced me that their add-ons are viable. So the first Heroku con is lessened. So it would be viable to choose a DB other than PostgreSQL, such as CouchDB or RethinkDB.

Therefore I’m calling it: Heroku.

[closacco]

:+1: