Investigate deployments

[rosszurowski]

We need to find a way to deploy things to the server.

This includes:

• Database
• Environment variables

Bonus points for:

• Slackbot deployment command

[rosszurowski]

Might be worth investigating CircleCI for CI and deployments. Tutum is another service worth exploring. Of course, all this assumes we're custom-hosting on DigitalOcean.

[rosszurowski]

After some looking around, I don't think we're going to get much better than the Heroku Hobby Plan.

• Easy deploys
• Fully isolated (so staging can't accidentally take down prod, ever)
• Unlimited staging environments (we can just use push to new free plan apps)
• At peak points of traffic, we can just scale things up to multiple dynos to handle load well without incurring big costs
• Only $2/month more than DigitalOcean

I know we were skeptical because of the limit of 10,000 free postgres rows and 20 concurrent connections. Turns out, those 20 connections were actually for Redis, and even if it was for Postgres, we'd just be using a connection pool anyways, so 20 is more than enough. Also, even with conservative estimates, 10k rows is more than enough: 100 students * 20 projects each still leaves 8k rows for other things.

Reopen this if you have any objections.