I'm building a graduation project that I'd like to present as a realistic client application, including a development-to-production deployment flow. The architecture has a Next.js frontend, a Traefik gateway, several NestJS services for authentication, issues, ingestion, and users, plus a FastAPI vector-search service. The infrastructure includes Kafka, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL with Keycloak, Consul, and Traefik. Each backend component runs in its own Docker container. Traffic will be extremely low—probably only one or two users—and I'm fine with cold starts. Ideally, I'd like persistent database storage, a domain with HTTPS, environment variables, authentication, and some kind of production-like deployment process. Are there any genuinely free hosting options that support multiple containers without requiring a credit card, or would a local deployment with a secure tunnel be more practical?
5 Answers
Another option is to simulate production locally. Keep the application in containers, use a local Kubernetes cluster if you want to demonstrate orchestration, and add a CI/CD runner that builds and deploys the images. Tools that emulate cloud APIs can help if you specifically want to show cloud-style infrastructure, but they won’t make the system publicly available.
If you want it accessible from outside your network, avoid exposing the server directly by its public IP. Put an access layer or VPN in front of it so the gateway and databases are not openly reachable. A private network overlay or an authenticated tunnel is much safer for a portfolio demonstration, especially when the authentication and database services are all running together.
For a project this large, a completely free hosted setup without a credit card will be difficult. You have several stateful services, Kafka, multiple databases, and service discovery, so the free hosting limits may become more of a problem than the application traffic. A small Linux virtual machine is probably the simplest production-like option, but it usually costs at least a little each month.
Be careful with free application-hosting platforms: many allow only a few stateless services, sleep inactive containers, limit disk persistence, or require a payment method for provisioning. You could host the frontend and a small API there, but running Kafka, three different databases, Keycloak, Consul, and all of the backend services on free tiers may not be practical. For this architecture, a local machine or inexpensive VM is more manageable.
You can run the full stack locally on a Linux machine and expose it through a secure tunnel. Use Docker Compose, a real domain, HTTPS through the tunnel or a reverse proxy, separate environment files, persistent volumes, and your existing CI/CD pipeline. That gives you a convincing deployment workflow without paying for hosting.
That could work. I mainly want to demonstrate the complete flow from development to a production-like environment, including the frontend, backend services, databases, authentication, HTTPS, and environment configuration.
I already have the CI/CD workflow in place, so combining that with local containers and a secure external tunnel may be the most realistic no-cost approach.