Easy AWS Hosting for Meteor with auto scaling

nicolaslopezj · 2018-09-26T16:04:29.069Z

Easy AWS Hosting for Meteor – Nicolás López – Medium

If you want to host your application in a easy to use and powerful platform like Galaxy or Heroku and pay much less using your own AWS…

Reading time: 3 min read

hemalr87 · 2018-09-28T00:47:51.521Z

This looks great. Will defo be trying it out soon.

Questions:

Is auto-scaling available? And if so, is it managed by AWS or Waves?
Where is the application code stored? Just AWS or Waves as well? Can the geographical location of AWS be configured for each app?
Do you have 2FA?
Are alerts incorporated?

Cheers for the link!

nicolaslopezj · 2018-09-28T03:42:07.263Z

Hi!

Auto scaling is available, configured in Waves and managed by AWS Autoscaling
It’s stored on AWS S3, if you revoke the access, Waves cannot access your code anymore.
Yes, you can change the region for every app. You can use all AWS regions.
Yes. https://waveshosting.com/settings/security
Not right now, but it’s in the roadmap.

If you have more questions please ask!

scottagirs · 2018-09-28T16:59:49.369Z

Is Pricing/Feature comparison available?

nicolaslopezj · 2018-09-28T17:49:07.773Z

In terms of pricing it’s far cheaper than galaxy. Waves connect to your AWS account and you pay directly to AWS.

In terms of pricing:

On galaxy:

3x compact containers (0.5 ECU, 512 MB each).
~$120/month.

On AWS:

2x t2.micro containers (1 vCPU, 1 GB each).
~$50/month (2x t2.micro + network load balancer).

Waves is free for one app, you have to pay $29 if you need to use more, so it’s still cheaper.

You can read this post for more info:

Eric Hartzog – 15 Feb 18

AWS vs Galaxy for Meteor Hosting

The verdict is clear, AWS absolutely dominates and at a lower price.

In terms of features, comparing the features Galaxy has on its website:

One-line ‘meteor deploy’ command -> “waves deploy” command
Push button scaling -> Yes, and also auto scaling
Built-in SEO prerendering -> No
Automated SSL included -> Yes
Zero downtime coordinated version updates -> Yes
Designed specifically for stateful Meteor apps -> It’s designed for Meteor and others
Built-in Meteor performance monitoring tools -> Yes
High availability fault tolerance -> Yes
Unlimited maximum containers -> Yes
Flexible container sizing options -> Yes, and many more options
Advanced traffic routing to least loaded containers -> Yes
Full logging and performance metrics -> Yes
Automatic load balancing and cluster management -> Yes

fermuch · 2018-10-05T12:49:09.516Z

I’ve just tried the service. I used a big app as a candidate (>5k LOC, around 1.5gb deploys) and it was the first time the deploy was as literally just one command.

Literally the only thing I had to do was waves deploy and done. I had my server ready.
I really appreciate being able to access my servers directly (I can ssh to the instances on AWS), and the support responded to all my questions in no time.

I’m extremely surprised at how easy it is to deploy apps. I’m thinking of migrating everything there!

hemalr87 · 2018-10-19T09:28:41.958Z

Finally getting round to experimenting with this. Question:

I understand the faster set up time that comes with setting up an admin level IAM AWS account for Waves, but it seems overkill. What are the minimal set of permissions needed - is there a template user policy?

jam · 2019-02-05T19:46:43.056Z

nicolaslopezj:

Built-in Meteor performance monitoring tools -> Yes

How does Waves’ monitoring tools compare to Galaxy’s? What granularity does it offer?

paulishca · 2019-06-19T08:56:32.746Z

Are there any more good or bad experiences with Waves?

jam · 2019-06-19T14:51:41.053Z

So far so good for me. I haven’t really pushed it in terms of auto scaling but it was pretty easy to set up and their support has been good.

I set up Monti APM for app monitoring.

paulishca · 2019-06-19T14:56:52.825Z

I use Monti too. So, I deployed one small website that I was keeping in Heroku and was really impressed with the level of convenience. I can run that free in a nano box for a year. It is a really small website.
Now I was moving a fork of my main project and realized … there are no T&C on the Waves website. There is no mention of SLA (at least for the paid accounts). In general there is no information about how confidential your data stays with them. If you paste all your env settings on their forms … get the guy on the web and sue him for the … unprovable.
So, I opened a question with them but as I see it … no minimum level of assurance, compliancy, GDPR etc…

jam · 2019-06-19T15:18:06.190Z

@nicolaslopezj can you comment on the above? Paul makes some great points.

jorgeer · 2019-06-21T07:36:16.425Z

I tried waves in early May, and could not get my app running. I tried contacting support and got an answer… a month later. So I can’t say I was reassured, and he didn’t address the problem I had been facing either, so.

paulishca · 2019-06-21T14:04:35.139Z

To be frank, it worked for me pretty fast, I only had some issue related to … the learning curve on the AWS portal, I may say. But overall I’d say the system at WavesHost is one of the best so far. If I had some Github behind it or some sort of CI I’d probably consider it the best option for Meteor. But then … going back to the initial problem … there is not much accountability behind it, or compliancy, or … standard … apparently no people too :))).
Anyway, prior to AWS I had my code in Heroku and with this box I was using I could not control the region more than … Europe. Initially I had Mongo Atlas and Heroku both in Frankfurt (both over AWS). Then Heroku moved me to Dublin and my methods DB time increased up to 500 ms. Since I moved my app in AWS directly and I have full control now on the region and I know I am in the same “building” with both App and DB, my average DB time on methods is … 10ms … I run on a T2 nano for the time being :)). All free tier for a year.