First stable release and deploy

[alexander34ro]

Prepare a new release with the refactored version of ITU-MiniTwit latest by Wednesday, Feb 19th, at 23:59)

Additionally, deploy that version (the one in the release) of your ITU-MiniTwit to a remote ("cloud") server. You are free to deploy wherever and however you want to. The only requirement is that your application is reachable via a public IP/domain.

OBS: The simulator API from the task above is considered as a part of your ITU-MiniTwit.

For development/deployment you may want to use virtualization techniques as discussed in today's lecture.

OBS MSc students: Remember to log and provide good arguments for the choice of virtualization techniques and deployment targets.

[alexander34ro]

We should discuss possible hosting solutions: Heroku, Digital Ocean, AWS, etc. And also virtualization methods: dynos, docker, vagrant.

[alexander34ro]

Heroku

Heroku is the easiest way of deploying an application to a public webserver. It uses Git for managing the application source code and apps can be deployed by simply pushing to the Heroku remote associated with the repository. For virtualization, it uses its own solution called Dynos which are configured using proc files and automatically set up using a slug of the source code.

Dynos are isolated, virtualized Unix containers, that provide the environment required to run an application.

Heroku Dynos can be easily scaled and tasked with different roles. Even though they are extremely convenient, Heroku also supports deploying via Docker containers, which might prove useful if we want to increase the stability of our setup.

I did a test deploy to Heroku. Our app can be found at https://minitwit-itu.herokuapp.com/public

Push command: git subtree push --prefix refactored_remote_code/api heroku master

To do: automate for CI/CD

References:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/how-heroku-works
https://www.heroku.com/deploy-with-docker
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/container-registry-and-runtime

[alexander34ro]

Digital Ocean

Digital Ocean offers superior performance to Heroku and is becoming one of the most popular cloud hosting companies. Its shortcomings are related to ease of use and configuration, as Heroku is preconfigured to handle popular application types such as our Node.js app. Even though Digital Ocean is a strong competitor, we prefer Heroku for its flexibility and ease of use.

AWS

AWS is far too complex for our use case. The fact that it also has no free version makes it a no go.

[alexander34ro]

Dynos and Docker

For virtualization technologies, we chose to use Heroku Dynos together with the possibility of switching to Docker if necessary to enable some more advanced features. Their main advantage over "Vagrant" is that they are more lightweight and easier to configure, resulting in lower overhead. Heroku offers great support for both options and we believe this flexibility is going to help us stay relevant in the future.

Vagrant

Vagrant was rejected for this project due to its significantly higher overhead compared to both Dynos and Docker. Vagrant also has lower support from the community which is an important aspect when trying to make an application future proof.

References:
https://www.ctl.io/developers/blog/post/docker-vs-vagrant

[alexander34ro]

As of version v0.8-alpha, our application can be found on Heroku at https://minitwit-itu.herokuapp.com/