The quickest thing to develop in is normally what you know. I find django the most productive web framework for things that might take off (for purely static sites I use Hugo and serve the site from S3, and deploy it using cloudformation - a great combo that lets me bring up a landing page in an hour or so).
It sounds like deployment is what you want to simplify. While there is extra overhead in learning to use docker, deployment is one of the major issues it solves. I spent a day or two learning docker and docker compose, and now I have a local dev environment I can work in, and I'll be able to deploy to a host quite simply. Makefiles are an excellent, simple companion to docker, so it's also worth learning them.
The big benefit of this is that you abstract your code from how to run it. So today you might like django, tomorrow ruby/language du jour, but all of that would still be built as a docker container which you'd be able to deploy to the same host with minor modifications.
Also, to set up user accounts, create storage buckets, etc check out terraform. The language it uses, HCL, is a trainwreck if you need conditionals, but apart from that it works well and is simple (too simple, that's the trouble). So a combination of:
* whatever web framework you're productive with
* built into a docker container
* with makefiles to ease administrative tasks
* terraform to configure a cloud backend
is a very powerful combination. But yeah, more stuff to learn. At least this approach means you can swap out the web framework for any other language and nothing else really needs to change.
It sounds like deployment is what you want to simplify. While there is extra overhead in learning to use docker, deployment is one of the major issues it solves. I spent a day or two learning docker and docker compose, and now I have a local dev environment I can work in, and I'll be able to deploy to a host quite simply. Makefiles are an excellent, simple companion to docker, so it's also worth learning them.
The big benefit of this is that you abstract your code from how to run it. So today you might like django, tomorrow ruby/language du jour, but all of that would still be built as a docker container which you'd be able to deploy to the same host with minor modifications.
Also, to set up user accounts, create storage buckets, etc check out terraform. The language it uses, HCL, is a trainwreck if you need conditionals, but apart from that it works well and is simple (too simple, that's the trouble). So a combination of:
* whatever web framework you're productive with
* built into a docker container
* with makefiles to ease administrative tasks
* terraform to configure a cloud backend
is a very powerful combination. But yeah, more stuff to learn. At least this approach means you can swap out the web framework for any other language and nothing else really needs to change.