App platfom vs standard install
Hey...I'm just wondering, was there any benefit to doing this on the app platform vs a normal server setup? When I saw that, I kind of assumed that it would be something that people do a lot and that I could find some info on it (laravel being deployed to app platform) but it was a lot more difficult to find other people talking about it than I was expecting.
It just got me thinking about doing a normal server deploy where I can ftp into it and update files without waiting for a re-build, but I wanted to check first and see if there was any benefit to doing it the way that it's written in the wave docs.
Would love some info on that :). Thanks
Hi there Alex,
Yes, both are perfectly valid approaches, it is a matter of a personal preference and the project requirements. Here are some of the pros and cons:
App Platform pros
- You don't have to manage your server including security upgrades, monitoring and maintenance
- You get automated deployments everytime you push your changes to GitHub
- You can scale horizontally by adding more containers easily without having to worry about server replication and load balancing
Standard Server
Pros:
- You have full access to the server and you can make any changes that you need
- It might be a bit cheaper if you go for a single server without an external Managed Database and a Load Balancer
Cons:
- You would need to install all of the security upgrades yourself, like PHP/MySQL/Nginx upgrades + all kernel upgrades as well
- You would need to have some kind of a monitoring solution in case that your server goes down for any reason so you could take action, with the App Platform the containers will be restarted automatically
- You would need to come up with your own deploy process, using SFTP is a valid option but it is manual and prone to mistakes. Instead you could configure a GitHub action using deployer for example to do that automatically, but this is again an extra thing that you would need to configure
If you decide to go with the standard server, you can use the Laravel 1-Click installation and then just push your Wave project to that server, here is a quick video:
Also if you decide to go with a standard server, you would need to make sure that you have backups enabled in case anything goes wrong.
Hope that this helps!
Best,
Bobby
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OH wow, thanks Bobby, that is really helpful. Never thought of most of that. I guess after reading all of that the app platform seems like an obvious choice. That makes it easy then...I'll just stick to what I have.
One more small related question if it's okay...regarding the database. Right now I just have the db built into the app platform as your docs assist with. Is there any way for me to know when/if this is no longer a good idea? Is there a way for me to know when I neeed to move to a separate db (if ever)? I'm just not sure of the limitations of the db being packaged into the app like it is now.
Thank you again very much for the help, I appreciate it.
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No problem at all Alex!
Yes, once you are ready to move to production, I could suggest moving to a separate database. The one that comes out of the box, is a dev database.
You can follow the steps from the DigitalOcean docs on how to upgrade your dev database to a managed cluster here:
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That's fantastic, thank you again for all the help.
No problem at all! Happy to help!