Hello Everyone!
Here’s a quick story of how Railway.app helped solve my hosting issues with Livebook.
FYI…I don’t work for Railway in any capacity, I just really enjoy their platform
I’m a huge fan of Livebook and wanted to collaborate with others on writing the book Elixir For Data Science. Given that, I needed a place to host it. Naturally, I went with the obvious option of Fly.io. The problem is, to actually use the packages I need (i.e. Explorer, Vega_lite, and Kino) I needed to scale up beyond the free tier to even download the packages let alone do any analysis. To save on cost I would “scale up” when I’m working and “scale down” when I’m not.
I didn’t realize it but what I really wanted was a deployment platform that would autoscale my Livebook instance based on my usage at any given moment. This is where Railway comes in. Railway can run anything that is in a Docker container on their platform. Their service has autoscaling as well as many other niceties built in that you can find on the website.
After having gone through the process of setting up Livebook on Railway, I decided to make a template (button below) so anyone else you use it. After you sign up for a Railway account, the steps are
- Click on the button
- Customize the Environment Variables
- Enjoy Livebook
I’m not sure if anyone else has used them for hosting Elixir projects, but I would be very interested to hear your feedback.
Also, I don’t mean for this to take away anything from Fly.io. They have a great platform, it just didn’t meet the specific need that I had in this instance.
Thanks so much for reading! Have a great day.
