Hey folks! I'm a machine learning engineer working on a product that solves a specific problem in the architecture field. I've built my demo app using multiple microservices managed through a docker-compose setup. Right now, I'm not worried about optimizing deployments; I plan to get expert advice later. My main focus is selecting the right server environment for deployment. The app needs to support between 10 to 100 users, so it won't be huge—definitely not thousands of users. It involves some basic neural network processing, but it should run fine on a decent CPU. I'm thinking about self-hosting, but reliability is more important, and I have some AWS experience, particularly with EC2. However, I'm trying to keep costs down. What hosting solutions do you guys recommend for a demo or prototype version of this app that are low-cost and have automatic scaling options? Thanks a lot for your help!
5 Answers
It really depends on your reliability goals and budget. EC2 can be super cheap, especially with T2 Micro or Nano instances. If you haven't already, check out AWS Free Tier! If your app’s not bloated, it can run great there. I think you could either go with AWS or just run your app from home during the demo phase. Plenty of major sites managed on tiny setups for years, so it's possible!
I recently deployed my small app on Civo and it's been fantastic! Their K3s setup is low-cost and way cheaper than the big providers. But if you really want to stick with the big guys, GCP is great, especially since their Kubernetes service is competitively priced.
I think EC2 is probably your best bet since you don’t need to complicate things with Kubernetes or ECS for a small app. If your application is a monolith, keeping it simple with just an EC2 setup will save you tons of time. If you’re doing neural network processing, consider putting that in a separate backend container so your frontend stays responsive for users and manage processing times more effectively. But if you want orchestration, AWS offers ECS which could also be a win.
Have you tried taking advantage of Azure's free $200 credits? It's a solid way to start without any initial costs!
Have you considered ECS with Fargate? It might provide you some flexibility without the overhead of managing servers yourself. Plus, Oracle Cloud is worth a shot too; there's a nice tutorial on deploying models on their servers!
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