We chose Javascript because it will be very easy for our dev team to create a website extremely quick in it. With ES6, Javascript has many features that were once desired and there is no longer anything lacking at all in the language. Our dev team also has lots of experience in Javascript which contributed to our choice of this language.
We chose GitHub to host our Git repository at since it is the leading service of its kind. GitHub has many features making it easy to manage projects and roadmaps, including GitHub Projects, GitHub Issues, and GitHub Milestones, as well as making it easy to manage multiple repositories and the organization we are affiliated with.
We chose to use Git for our version control as it is simple and easy to use. Our dev team has used Git since they first learned to write code and no other version control system has ever stood out to our dev team as a clearly superior alternative to Git. With that being said, Git was the obvious choice for us to use for version control.
We chose React for our website's frontend as React is the most prominent Javascript framework and our dev team has extensive experience with it. The AWS SDK integrates flawlessly with React and a member of our dev team has used the AWS SDK with React many times before, contributing further for our choice of using React over another Javascript framework, like Angular. A member of our dev team has also done state management with MobX in React before, giving us another reason to choose React as we expect we will need to keep track of some sort of global state within the React website.
We chose to use ES6 for our React website's Javascript since ES6 brings with it support for so many features that can be oh so useful when writing a complex website. Since ES6 is the modern standard nowadays, there was no reason for us not to use ES6, as without it we would be depriving ourselves of useful features for no benefit.
We chose to use HTML5 for our React website as HTML5 is the newest, mainstream version of HTML and it supports many things that used to require outside libraries to accomplish, such as canvas. We may need to use some features specific to HTML5 in constructing charts, especially any chart libraries we may import, so it was a no brainer to use HTML5 as it is the modern standard for HTML.
We chose Node.js for hosting our website since it integrates seamlessly with React, allowing for speedy serving of content with little trouble to try and make it work. Our dev team also has lots of experience with Node.js website hosting and with Node.js backends, which lent weight to our decision to use it for hosting our React website.
We chose to use Amazon S3 to store the build of our React website as uploading the build that npm generates of our React website to an Amazon S3 website is seamless using the AWS CLI. Amazon S3 also provides primitive website hosting features for fast viewing of a developer version of our website, which contributed to our reasoning to use S3 to store the build of our React site as it will enable us to store the website build while also providing a dev website that won't be visible to customers immediately.
We chose Amazon CloudWatch to monitor all of our AWS microservices as it is automatically integrated with all microservices within AWS, being the default logger for every service. It is also very easy to alarm on any issues within any of our AWS microservices, such as a database experiencing more reads or writes than we might expect.
Amazon Cognito allows us to easily manage user pools and authentication in our React frontend, ensuring that only authorized users can access the website and by extension our database. Easy addition of users and enabling of two factor authentication contributed to our reasoning to choose to use Amazon Cognito for our user pools.
