flyctl VS multipass

For frontend deployment, I used Netlify (for the generous free package) and the recommended fly.io for server + database (also cheap package).

Create an account on Fly.io.

You can learn more about fly.io and tigris, we will need to create an account on both platforms for this project regardless. Anyway with the theory out of the way let's get started in the next section as we create our accounts and start building the app.

Fly.io is a platform that helps you run your apps and databases closer to your users all around the world. It takes your app code, packages it up neatly, and puts it on virtual machines that can be quickly started or stopped. This makes your app faster for users and more reliable. Fly.io is easy to use, works well for small projects or personal apps. It's a great way to make sure your app runs smoothly for people no matter where they are.

In this post, we'll start from scratch, running FerretDB locally via Docker, trying out the connection with mongosh and the MongoDB Node.js client, and finally deploy FerretDB to Fly.io for a production ready set up.

2- fly.io

Fly is a cloud platform that focuses on global edge computing. Fly specializes in high-performance hosting and provides a global network of edge locations. Fly is known for its scalability and performance optimizations.

But videototextai.com is built using NextJS + Firebase auth + Firestore and a backend deployed at fly.io . Fly makes it really easy to deploy docker containers and that is IMO the fastest way to develop, you can setup a local setup

Alternatives explored: * northflank: While running the wrk test, requests were taking 3-7 seconds. Couldn't repeat Heroku's phenomenon of "400ms-800ms" during such a load test. * fly.io: Reliability: It’s Not Great * render.com: I remember the time when indiehackers.com was down because of an outage on Render, not sure if it's worth trusting.

For personal/portfolio projects fly.io and render.com both have free tiers that support the major backend frameworks and Postgres at the very least (although I think with Render at least the DB expires and has to be reloaded after a certain amount of time, have not personally tried it).

Install Multipass from https://multipass.run

Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances

Multipass I love Multipass for quick Ubuntu instances spun up for testing or as a playground. Wish I would have known and used of it sooner.

If you just need Ubuntu then you can try "Multipass" from Canonical (https://multipass.run/). Works quite well on my M2 Air. I haven't tried using Linux GUI with it though as I need only terminal based VMs.

Multipass is pretty clutch for trivial VMs on MacOs for sure. I use it for a bunch of ssh jump boxes running vpns to different sites. The macOS build does not support custom images (lest not without [some truly insane hacks](https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1260#issuecomm...) , which doesn’t really matter for what I use it for but it is kind of a bummer. If you need something with a little more grunt but don’t want to go full blown with writing your own QEMU tooling or fussing with something like UTM or Parallels, [quickemu](https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu) is a really nice qemu wrapper with sane defaults that can expose a whole lot of power if you need it.

I would be cautious or even distrustful of using anything from Oracle. VirtualBox components come under three different licenses - GPLv2, personal use & evaluation license, and an enterprise license. Their VirtualBox license FAQ [1] gives them enough leeway to change future licenses at will. If an exploit is discovered in your old VirtualBox and they've changed the license, you're out of luck.

We've moved our development to KVM and Virtual Machine Manager on Linux [3] and UTM on Mac [4]. There are other options to run your VM, such as Multipass [5] or VirtualBuddy [6].

On a digressive topic - it was fun migrating our legacy application server stack from Oracle Java (old & poorly considered decision) to OpenJDK, thanks to their license [2].

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

[2] https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk-faqs.htm...

[3] https://ubuntu.com/blog/kvm-hyphervisor

[4] https://mac.getutm.app/

[5] https://multipass.run/

[6] https://github.com/insidegui/VirtualBuddy

How does it compare to https://multipass.run/?

If you have a reasonably beefy computer, you can always try setting up Multipass and set up 2-3 nodes for a k8s cluster, it's how I'm doing my own certification training. I do have a k3s Raspberry Pi cluster, but with Pi prices being what they are still it'd almost be cheaper to do a cloud setup. ☹️