But I'm highly interest now in building my own stuff, maybe a simple web app with nest + next + postgress or whatever that I can capitalize (a Saas??), maybe a game for icebreakers (like wikitrivia, wordle, etc) just for fun.
How do people host this things? How do I even start learning this? Should I really try my lucky on AWS stuff and pray to not wake up with a bill in my credit card?
Sounds so easy to deploy a static thing in GitHub pages but so scary to deploy any API on AWS.
Get a cheap second hand machine to use as a server - 2 cpu cores and 2gb ram should suffice. Install debian onto it. Set it up so you can administer it remotely over ssh. Learn how to install and start your app as a service using systemd - get that working manually. Write yourself a list of all the steps you took to install your app. Format the disk, reinstall debian, see if you can follow your steps to get your app working again. Learn ansible, rewrite your manual install and deploy steps as an ansible playbook that can be executed over ssh. Format the disk, reinstall Debian, see if you can execute your ansible playbook to install your app without any manual steps. Get another second hand machine, install debian on it as well, set it up so it can also be administered by ansible. Now see if you can deploy your app to both machines at the same time, with your one playbook.
Congratulations, now you're deploying like it's 2012!
You don’t need AWS. Do you have hundreds of thousands of daily active users? Do you need auto scaling and layers of compliance? Do you need specific offerings like GPU time etc? If not the read ahead.
I’d recommend firebase for auth, hosting (your static web assets like ur web app), and storage (uploads). It’s cheap af and most importantly easy.
For your backend application you can use gcloud to deploy it to app engine. Takes one command and it’s live.
When you’re building a company you want to move fast af with reasonable tech choices.
All of these can be hotswapped easily depending on how you build your actual software. Making it “work right” (hint: it never will) is for the engineers who come on board when you’re spinning on the flywheel to spend hours bike shedding. At that time you can afford to waste time because you’ve already made it.
When you get services running on your local machine, you can get them running on a remote machine as well.
Heroku is basically "here is a repository with my server app, run it".
Netlfiy is basically "here is a repository with my web app, host it".
I really don't have to think about much. Heroku is pretty cheap and Netlify is free for small sites. To me it's a no brainer as it saves me a ton of time.
If a project every blows up, I can pay more money to scale these solutions up. And since my apps are still simple (i.e. no cloud vendor specific solutions), it's still easy to move my app somewhere else or redesign it with a new architecture if needed. (There are numerous alternatives to both Heroku and Netlify).
If you want something a bit easier, Vultr or Digital Ocean are both ridiculously easy to spin up a server and has all the stacks you mentioned as well as hundreds of ready made images / apps. Less worry there with over-spending.
Very easy to spin up a server and deploy a CMS or host files etc. They also make a newb friendly product called Lightsail.
If you are worried about waking up to a crazy bill, 2 solutions for that. 1. setup a billing alarm for 1, and 2 use a credit card with a low limit or even use a prepaid Visa card.
We abstract away all the complexity of CI, Serverless, generating an OpenAPI specification etc...
Follow this guide and you've got an API deployed in a few minutes, with OIDC integration and everything you need: https://wundergraph.com/blog/never_write_openapi_specificati...
2) there are also some smaller projects like https://github.com/outblocks
3) finally there are also services that can be described as "backend as a service" where you don't have to care about dev ops - firebase, supabase, appwrite, nhost, parseplatform
In any chance of one of my draft apps become viral I'll find a DevOps specialist to help
Do you have access to the code that does this at your employer? Or do you know the people that work on it? I didn't know most of this when I started work but my understanding came from how it was done at work.
Or just go to Heroku.