I will list some of the options I tried that were very convenient for deployment and testing purposes. But, after trying all those I can recommend you the one that can be a low-cost option even if you are going to production.
- Back4app
The deployment is made easy by this and I think this is effortless to set up. All you need to do is authenticate the GitHub with your Dockerfile in it and push if you have any changes to be made. It will handle all the installation and deployment in minutes.
You don’t have to worry at all about the costs as well because all you need is $5/month. You do get a free few hundred hours for keeping your app live.
Currently, it allows 25k requests/month for free.
When the endpoints are not being hit, the container will go to sleep and you will not be spending your free hours. So, for testing purposes, it is quite fun. - Render
It is very similar to what Back4app does. The whole setup is similar to Back4app. But it gives slightly more free instance hours.
- AWS Lambda
Many people find it easy, but to be honest, I was not able to find any convenient setups to get my app running quickly.
It felt like a lot of work to get the app running and even the continuous deployment felt like a hassle.
If you defend AWS Lambda, then I easily lose the argument, but, I never spent much time getting it to work. - Google Cloud Run
This is the most cost-effective and convenient deployment in my opinion.
You can check the pricing for your need here: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator
But, I think this can be cost-effective even if I go to live. For 1 million requests/month, I will be paying only 9 cents. This was crazy to me. I don’t think I will have that many requests in a year.
You will have to create a project in the Google Cloud Console and pick the region, setup the Cloud Run, authenticate your Github, set the deployment on Github (just by a few clicks), pick a branch and you can enjoy the benefits of getting the new images for every new commit that you make.
I have been using it for months and the amount still hasn’t gone up 1 cent. It still shows $0.00.
This makes me so confident and safe that I can grow with it without having insane cloud costs.
The best one
If I have to pick the best one then you have already guessed it, yes, the Google Cloud Run. It is the best. If uptime matters to you, and if you want the instance to be running 24/7 then, the cost will go up to about $9/month.
More info
But if a small wake up time doesn’t bother you much, then you will never have to pay for all the time when no requests are being made to your app.
If you have figured out some even better ways for the deployments, then please comment and enlighten me.
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