About a year and a half ago (written June 2013) we moved from dedicated servers over to AWS. Thanks to AWS, we no longer have to think on a server level. Instead, we think of everything as a cluster of instances, and an instance is essentially a virtual server where we don’t have to worry about the hardware. It’s a relief to not have to worry about the hardware behind the instances.

The clusters we have are: WWW, API, Upload, HAProxy, HBase, MySQL, Memcached, Redis, and ElasticSearch, for an average total of 80 instances. Each cluster handles the job that its name describes, all working together for the common goal of giving you your daily (hourly?) dose of image entertainment.

Below is a diagram of how they all work together:

We use Microsoft Azure because many of our clients are already Azure for their private cloud. Additionally, Azure supports App Service Environments (ASE), which isolates the application resources and gives us a static IP for securely accessing external resources

Additionally, MSSQL supports columnstore tables which is critical for running fast analytics over large datasets

We liked a lot of things about Heroku. We loved the build packs, and we still in fact use Heroku build packs, but we were frustrated by lack of control about a lot of things. It’s nice to own the complete stack, or rather as far down as AWS goes. It gave us a lot of flexibility and functionality that we didn’t have before. We use a lot of Amazon technology.

I like containers and all, but for zerotoherojs.com I am a one-man band, who also works full time. I don’t have any (dev)ops budget, and therefore I need the reliability and uptime of an actual virtual machine.

That’s where AWS EC2 comes in handy.

Docker containers will be hosted and run on a single Amazon EC2 instance. This will likely be the t2.small or t2.medium instance type as listed here: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

DigitalOcean offers us everything we need to test out specific scenarios or we expect from small-servers like our monitoring-system. We also use digital-ocean in long-term and are very satisfied with their performance and scalability.

Because servers. Lots of them. Lots of configurations. Great for mission-specific functions. Video encoding, data aggregation, dedicated processing, mission-critical data stores. Anything you can't hang off your Heroku environment.

If not using managed hosting services like Heroku, AWS Lambda, or Google Cloud Functions, used to host programs because of ease of use and low cost.

Generally used less recently for these use cases than managed hosting services.

The ultimate hosting provider. Solid-state drives. Virtual Private Servers. $5 per month. Pinch me am I dreaming? If you can dream it you can build it too.

Because I like having more control of my deployment, I am currently hosting this on DigitalOcean. I don't need to worry about arbitrary row limits and I can be sure that the app is always running.

My favourite cloud with all the great tools - web apps, mobile apps, storages, easy tables, blobs, app insights, cosmos DB... I think it is really usable and ergonomic. Plus point for mobile app.

We currently host PRS and EARS on Azure as they are .Net apps, but we are currently porting these services to Scala and will be hosting them on Heroku with the other P2 SRX services.

Serviço utilizado para deploy de toda a infraestrutura do projeto. Colocamos todas as peças do serviço no azure, garantindo uma forma rápida e garantia de escalibilidade.

We use DigitalOcean to host our build tools (namely Drone.io) for a cheap CI and CD server.

We'll be using this to host the server application during alpha phase.

Blackbaud makes use of Azure and my current job is with Blackbaud. Therefore, due to the free credit and the ability to reuse tools, I rely on Azure quite a bit.