TLDR:
Stack:
Ubuntu
Microk8s
Postgres
Cherries on top:
Grafana
Metabase
Cloud Agnostic Way
You probably seen crazy amount of credits cloud providers give? The only is issue is that you will stuck with them and pay 3-10x more than market price after that.
The solution? Be Cloud Agnostic.
We are at SellMeThisPen AI decided to minimize our cloud expenses since we are bootstrapped company and revenue is literally our lifeline.
All cloud providers have Ubuntu. So why not just use it?
Don'ts:
Don't depend on built-in cloud monitoring tools. Use Grafana
Don't depend on custom Kubernetes, use opensource e.g. Microk8s
Don't depend on lock-on DBs (e.g. DynamoDB), use opensource Postgres. Managed solution is fine though if easy to migrate away.
Don't use anything which has vendor name in unless you see clear path to easily switch
So far we jumped from AWS to Azure in less than a weekend, no hard fillings Microsoft, but we can jump to any cloud after that too.
Overhead
There definitely will be overhead for managing it in the begging, and lack of expertise to make it work. But with ChatGPT and god's help you can quickly make it work. As a bonus you will know a lot more about the whole infra and maybe create your own cloud one day :D
If you are very far from it's okay to start with everything managed for you, but beware it will get exponentially harder to migrate away when time pass.
Forgotten Pros
As on the bright side - you can tweak your infra as you like. Websockets? No problem. Open specific port for some obscure software - check? Install any Postgres extension - you got it. If you need to grow to the very big scale - you would have to build your own infra anyway (not very likely though, but let's stay optimists :))
Overall
Don't fall for managed/worry free/serverless marketing, you are an engineer and can handle it with less additional black boxes which can fail on you. Good luck!
Top comments (1)
The article "Cloud Agnostic Way" on DEV Community provides practical advice for minimizing cloud vendor lock-in. It suggests strategies like relying on open-source tools (e.g., MicroK8s for Kubernetes and Postgres for databases) over proprietary cloud services. This approach enables easier migration across platforms, thus avoiding high post-credit costs from cloud providers. Being "cloud agnostic" is advantageous, as it keeps infrastructure flexible and adaptable to different clouds while allowing customization for scalability and unique technical needs. This guide is valuable for anyone aiming to keep cloud setups efficient and future-ready.