Deployment Tools
Introduction
If your team has been working hard, there’s a chance that you’re almost ready to start testing your project! If you’re working with a client, you may also want to deploy your work for them to check out.
There’s good news! You don’t need to mess around with AWS or other cloud services to deploy fast and free.
We’ll go over some really simple and free solutions here. You may already be familiar with them - in that case, just use it as a reminder of the options available to you!
Vercel
If you need to host frontend for free, Vercel is the best option on the market. It provides generous usage limits, lighting fast builds, and doesn’t require a credit card.
Plus, you can easily connect your GitHub repository and automatically deploy a specific branch every time changes are committed.
Vercel supports a wide variety of frameworks, including
And many more! It also supports several frameworks / runtimes in beta or without extensive support, including Go and Ruby on Rails.
Note that Vercel "breaks" your application down into serverless functions, so unexpected behavior happens from time to time.
Vercel
Fly.io
If you feel restricted by Vercel’s serverless function deal, you can run any application on a VM using Fly!
Rates are very cheap and free limits are generous, but unfortunately, you do need to buy credits or enter payment details. If you buy the minimum number of credits ($25), you basically have a lifetime of deployment for your hobby projects!
Also, it’s easy to get support using their community forum and support for many frameworks / runtimes is ready out of the box.
Fly.io
However, you should be comfortable with Docker and basic UNIX concepts, as project-specific bugs occur frequently and you will need to resolve them yourself.
One minor downside is that their services experience outages or interruptions every once in a while. They usually don’t affect your applications, but may prevent you from deploying changes or properly monitoring status (these issues are rare and acceptable in my opinion, since you are getting their services for free).
Other features - optional CI/CD with GitHub Actions, database clusters, Sentry monitoring, and so on.
Fly.io
Honorable Mentions
Mostly for static site hosting (AFAIK)
Cloud infrastructure but… easier? I’ve never used it, but the Infrastructure team is playing around with it!
Application hosting, push notifications, authentication, databases, analytics, and more!
Thank you!