My Infrastructure is becoming messy and expensive

Hey!

One option that you could consider here is to transfer over your dev environment to a single Droplet. That way you will cut your infrastructure costs for your dev environment, but still keep your production app running on the App Platform so you can take advantage of the scalability and the operational efficiency.

For your dev environment, you could use Docker to containerize your applications. Docker containers can run anywhere, making it easier to manage dependencies and reduce the number of servers you need.

So you will be able to have all of your services running on a single Droplet as Docker containers. You could even use Docker compose for easier management of all containers.

DigitalOcean offers 1-Click installation image for Docker:

https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/docker

Here is a simplified Docker compose file that packages all of your services together:

version: '3.8'

services:
  frontend:
    image: node:14
    working_dir: /app
    volumes:
      - ./frontend:/app
      - /app/node_modules
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    command: sh -c "npm install && npm start"
    depends_on:
      - backend

  backend:
    image: python:3.9
    working_dir: /app
    volumes:
      - ./backend:/app
      - /app/venv
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
    command: sh -c "pip install -r requirements.txt && flask run --host=0.0.0.0"
    environment:
      DATABASE_URL: "postgres://user:password@db:5432/devdb"
      ELASTICSEARCH_URL: "http://elasticsearch:9200"
    depends_on:
      - db
      - elasticsearch

  db:
    image: postgres:13
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: devdb
      POSTGRES_USER: user
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: password
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"

  elasticsearch:
    image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.10.0
    environment:
      - discovery.type=single-node
    ports:
      - "9200:9200"

volumes:
  db_data:

Overview:

• frontend: This service uses a Node.js image and mounts the local frontend directory to the container’s /app directory. It also exposes port 3000 and installs dependencies before starting the application.
• backend: This service uses a Python image, mounts the local backend directory to the container’s /app directory, and exposes port 5000. It sets environment variables for the database and ElasticSearch URLs and installs dependencies before starting the Flask application.
• db: This service uses a PostgreSQL image, sets up a database named devdb, and mounts a Docker volume for persistent storage. It exposes port 5432.
• elasticsearch: This service uses an ElasticSearch image, sets it to run in single-node mode, and exposes port 9200.
• volumes: Defines a named volume for PostgreSQL data storage.

And for your production environment, you could keep things as they are as that way you can take advantage of all of the production-ready features that the App Platform offers along with the managed database.

Let me know if you have any questions!

- Bobby