Infrastructure as code deployment options in 2024?

I have looked quite a lot at Vultr but I have not used them. There offering seems competitive and their network was fast when testing all the cloud providers.

Logflare is my pick either hosted or self hosted for logging using google bigquery, very economical.

Other than that I use fly for some things and getting projects up and running in non production quickly. I also host my own gitea on fly.io using sqlite backend rather than using Gitlab or GitHub. It’s very fast.

If you can qualify for the AWS startup $100k credit I wouldn’t ignore AWS.

My biggest challenge for security compliance is that only the major clouds like AWS, Azure or Google meet the requirements. So ultimately for anything of value it has to be those three.

I would not trust a word those companies are saying, taking in consideration their reputation at processing and collecting personal data.

Considering there is now Kubernetes backend for FLAME, I’d go with Kubernetes, just to have the option. I don’t think anyone has written a DigitalOcean backend yet.

We run our app in Kubernetes (AWS EKS) at work. Clustering with libcluster works great.

Vultr I was unaware of. I’ll definitely throw them in the mix.
And yes, when I said digital ocean, I meant for kubernetes support. I didn’t realize Flame could be used for FLAME directly. Intriguing.

Fly also just launched FKS ( Fly Kubernetes Service) if kubernetes is a hard requirement for you. Also note that folks run kubernetes themselves on fly already so we’re probably lower level than you’re thinking. We can run anything in a container. My guess is we tick all the IaC boxes for you already.

I don’t trust, the best I can do is verify the independent audit reports and compliance certifications and make risk based decisions. The security posture of the AWS, Azure and Google clouds is sufficient for most government systems and meeting privacy requirements of most countries (non defence and national security use cases) but it is something you have to consider on a service by service basis as not all services are created equal or they contain elements that are not managed at the same level.

A classic one is Microsoft Purview, a data governance solution which crawls all over your entire digital estate and yet doesn’t meet government compliance standards. Several times the resulting risk assessment is a handbrake on the plans of a newly established business unit tasked with implementing enterprise data governance, and of course like most corporate lemmings they reach for Microsoft. “Not happy” directors.

Geez, you’re optimistic. It’s not 2024 yet.

Like that even means anything. They’re very happy to outsource liability, like most governments. I can bet a good dollar that exactly zero proper auditing was done by government(-affiliated) entities.

Back on topic, I was wondering about Vultr for a long time. I’ll need some extra backup servers and some distributed workers sometime in 2024 so it’s either going to be them or Hetzner.

Vultr has good global coverage including Australia and SE Asia and a reasonable level of security compliance as well which is also improved recently.

Vultr are also good for HA setups with floating IP which avoids the cost and upper limits on throughout of cloud service load balancers and additional latency.

Vultr also actively support FreeBSD which I prefer for servers due to better networking with Erlang BEAM as FreeBSD kqueue is more efficient and scalable than anything Linux does. The total observaility of every subsystem is something I could not pass up.

AWS also provide a good option with their Firecracker VMs which boot FreeBSD in 25ms. With such a fast boot time you can instantly demand scale and failover without paying for headroom or contingency.

For deployment I also prefer FreeBSD jail’s which are also supported by Nomad.

For cloud storage and backup definitely look at wasabi with 11x9s durability and a lot cheaper than AWS ($6.99 TB/month and no egress charges).