Redeploying Rediscover.Work to Save Money Part 1

After five years working in startups, and more recently in 'stealth mode' startups I have decided to go back to my favourite place to work. This means that I can now share some of my hacking projects more openly.

At the moment one of my side projects which I want to keep alive is Rediscover.Work. It is currently hosted in AWS using Elastic Beanstalk and RDS. This made sense at the time when I was trying to get the site up quickly. Now that the project is no longer funded though it is time to do a bit of belt tightening.

As with any project it is worth looking at different options for how it could be deployed. There were never more than there are now:

* AWS Elastic Beanstalk + RDS. Current running cost of around $96 per month. + Easy install. -  Cost.
* AWS Lambda + RDS. + Simple scaling. - Migration costs are prohibitive.
* EC2 Instance: $9.52 according to the price calculator. + Already have needed tools - More admin to manage instance personally.
* Google App Engine and Cloud SQL: $8.01 according to the price calculator. + Ease of mantenance and app engine security scanning. - Migration to app engine layout.

As I already have all the tools needed to create the EC2 Instance solution and it requires the minimum investment in tooling I chose to go down that route first and see how things played out. In part 2 of this blog I will see how hard it is to migrate to app engine as this seems like a better solution for the long term.

Workflow:

1. Build dependencies and update dependency versions using

mvn versions:display-dependency-updates

2. Package the code into a WAR to be deployed on the new shared EC2 instance.
3. Launch a new instance which will run the site and database.
4. Start hacking ansible (and loose the will to live due to so many issues with config).
5. Stop.

Look out for part 2 where I will probably decide to migrate the whole project as managing machines is getting too painful for this time poor old coder.