thumbor VS coolify

- Image transformations | Again, use Do's $5 droplet. Install thumbor.org .Enjoy!

This is not a feature native to Cloudfront, it is something you need a dedicated service or function for. This aws blog article demonstrates a method using CloudFront Lambda@edge with a lambda that handles the image resize. Years ago before lambda@edge existed, I used an open source project thumbor behind CloudFront to handle this.

So I found this project: Thumbor This service is self-hosted, and It allows on-demand cropping, resizing, applying filters and optimizing images. It works incredibly fast and does not require a lot of resources. Take a look, and you will understand how it works.

Images - ideally use webp format, and keep images as small as possible by loading in only what you need in terms of resolution. Ie, if user is on mobile, and image is displayed in ie 320x160, don't load huge image for desktop and resize it in-browser. This can be achieved by tools like Thumbor.

You will need Thumbor to use this method. If you're unfamiliar with Thumbor then I wrote an introduction here.

This is my first quick try deploying SvelteKit with the open source software Coolify by Andras Bacsai.

With a serverful approach, you can avoid these drawbacks, and the main challenge lies in selecting the platform that aligns with your requirements. Options may include AWS, Render, DigitalOcean, and others. While VPS is also an option, it's generally not recommended due to the significant setup and maintenance overhead involved (logging, monitoring, CI/CD pipelines, etc.). However, you can make your life easier by leveraging tools like Coolify that help managing your VPS.

Heroku and similar providers can simplify the server management issues, but you can use something much better that can combine both cost efficiency and ease of deployment—Coolify:

> VPSs being “easy to manage” is a strong option full of assumptions.

There are definitely many footguns with managing a VPS but I think the threshold to get vaguely competent with a VPS is not really that far off with getting familiar with the average cloud platform - which comes with its own dangers, like the near-total inability to put an upward cap on fees that that person found out with Netlify recently.

Having a $5 VPS and knowing it's never going to cost your more than $5 might balance out a lot of things on the other side for a lot of people.

(And, as a bonus, it comes with the benefit of having a better idea of what is going on on the actual computer which is running your code.)

Platforms like https://coolify.io/ (which I have not tried, but looks interesting) seem to give you some of the abstractions that you get in cloud platforms to save you having to mess with too much low level stuff and become an expert in a billion separate systems.

If you have Debian with automatic updates that does most of the heavy lifting for you. The hardest problem I have is resisting the temptation to just install everything, because the cost to do it is capped at my VPS monthly fee.

So yep, it comes with a lot of assumptions. But so does everything!

https://coolify.io/ might be worth a look

The modern iteration of these tools has taken the developer experience learnings from the Platform as a Service (PaaS) category, and will bring them to your own VM, giving you your own personal PaaS. Example of this include Dokku, Coolify, Caprover, Cloud66 and many more!