Best practices for building and deploying web applications on a cloud platform?

[Cedric]

Many web developers are using cloud-based platforms and services to host and manage their websites and web applications, as it can provide scalability, flexibility, and cost savings.

Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing services, including storage, processing, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence, over the Internet (the cloud). These services are provided by cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

In web development, cloud computing can be used to build, deploy, and host web applications and websites. One of the main benefits of using cloud computing in web development is the ability to scale resources up or down as needed, which allows for more efficient use of resources and cost savings.

What are some best practices for building and deploying web applications on a cloud platform?

 

[Arantor]

The first best practice: do your costing. Assess what services you *actually* need and scope out what you're actually paying for.

For example, if you look at Cloudways which is a provider that runs a managed layer on Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS etc. you can compare approximately equivalent plans across them - and AWS can be more expensive depending on your needs. It's vital that you price out the services that you need.

After that, the question becomes how you manage deployments, whether you're running just bare instances on AWS EC2 or similar, or you're running one of the management layers (e.g. Kubernetes) and how you get new code and updates out to it.

I don't want to go into a lot more detail because that starts to really matter if you're scaling sideways in a hurry but surprisingly few forums benefit from that, and often it's better to scale up on a bigger dedi host, and then separating the database from the front end if you get that far. Most of the forum scripts in particular are pretty heavily optimised at this point for pure performance on the server.