Krew - The social intranet

Hosting and managing a self-setup kubernetes cluster has its very own up- & downsides.

We would not consider managed kubernetes because of its very high cost. So we used to run a cluster on a set of VPS-Nodes for cheap.

It gives great flexibility and full controll over all your apps and infrastructure.

But as we were mostly done experimenting and looking for reliability we swiched to Render.com. The decition was mostly driven by the cheap prices they have at the time. Alltough we are goin to switch our database to a more distributed engine like CockroachDB or PlanetscaleDB once we run into full production.

For now, their hosted-postgres offer serves us very good.

We use MongoDB as our primary database. It provided great performance and versatility, but in combination with Nest.js and GraphQL the overhead in templating and files to create was just too huge.

We switched to Prisma.js and Postgres for the reason of great DX. We migrated our data with ease and instantly dropped 100s of schema files off our repository. Also we do not have to deal with cyclic module dependencies when developing our graph api. Its just a pleasure.

Stripe is very well known for its developer experience and great documentation. We considered Recurly and other tools because of the easy tax-automations and subscription handling.

But lately Stripe introduces its own tax-handling feature, and it was just a perfect match for our usecase. Also we are migrating some of our billing to a Pay-per-Use system, wich Stripe supports very well.