A post that I saw in our community, decided to share it here and will invite the author here.
"The app allows people to start micro podcasts to share stories/ thoughts with small groups of friends. It's great if you have friends all over the world or just want to have deeper async discussions.
The app uses Django Rest Framework for the entire backend and it's hosted via Appliku!"
This is a great idea. Have you ever written about it somewhere? I would like to read and share with others. I know a few people who could benefit from that.
After many years of experiments i came to the same exact conclusion.
In 15 years I haven't seen a single case when splitting a project into multiple apps brought anything but pain.
Also, splitting files like models into packages is also a great approach. 6 months ago I found myself with models.py, API.py (my alternative for API views vs regular views) and serializes.py each over 3k lines of code. Spent 3 days splitting them into small files by topic. Way easier to work.
I also wish docs suggested that it is an option and better to split them earlier. Because it is so easy to just "add one more model to the end of the file, what can go wrong?"
The common wisdom was always not to rely on it for any of your users (for far too long) and build something separate as soon as possible. But i must admit that lately it got much much better. I only recently discovered that you can have multiple admins with it's own admin models.
So way less hacks.
I actually want to try build an app just to see how far I can push it with Django admin and see how hacks it will end up.
For this case, Django apps usually pick services like Sentry, and it is the app's responsibility to integrate with them anyway, so there is nothing we need to offer.
Although the idea around some built-in analytics is still on my mind.
But it can easily become a huge pain for high-load projects, so I am not rushing this feature.
Interestingly, when I started building Appliku, there was only Forge and Hatchbox, and that was enough of a validation for this type of service.
In the second year, a few more services popped up.
In the third year, the market was flooded with various services in this space. All of them were and still are generic for all languages and frameworks. The most popular niche I've observed is on top of AWS, but still – for any programming language.
Back to Appliku and Python/Django niche:
The reason I picked this niche and STAYED in this niche is that not only I can build the service for them, but I also can support users of the Python/Django stack better, answer most of their questions, and help with problems from on top my head very fast and help them achieve their goals quickly.
I also know NodeJS stack and NextJS, and we have a small number of such apps deployed as well. Appliku's dashboard is NextJS too.
But I can't do such support for other programming languages and frameworks.
Regarding customizations and trying to fit all cases into one platform:
With a focus on Django comes a narrowing down on the expectations and requirements for the deployment process. Django projects are monoliths that, most of the time, either fit the standard Dockerfile or need a few tweaks to one.
The biggest category of requested customization so far was adding different types of databases. Thanks to docker, this is relatively easy to add.
And thanks to this low variety, the whole service is pretty easy to use as we don't need to offer/allow a million ways to configure your app compared to what other PaaS are trying to do(especially VC-backed) because they need to cater to everyone.
Thanks again, TGIF, and have a great upcoming weekend!
No load balancing, although planned. Can put cloud flare or other CDN on top of it.
Databases. Our database offering doesn't try to compete with other managed DB providers where they have tons of people busy with databases alone. And we have only me to code everything. So super durable and high availability databases is not our game at least for now.
We provide backups and few tools around databases. That's usually quite enough for smaller project, staging environments, but for High Availability best to pick RDS and stuff like that.
I am curious what makes it tough to deploy on render?
I didn’t do it alone, the marketing website, illustrations, logo, testing and a lot of product work was done by my cofounder @krisindev
But all of the coding of the app itself yes - that’s me :)
Would you like to join our discord https://appliku.com/discord and so I can ask you a million questions about your struggles with deployments? Always curious to hear what other devs are doing.
Hey!
Yes, it takes root and sets up everything needed.
Nothing happens to server if you stop paying, I will be just emailing you and asking what we could do better :)
You won’t be able to create apps or add more servers until you resume payments though, but nothing gets locked out breaking your apps etc.
In fact you can add a server through custom server option, then remove it from appliku and remove appliku keys. Free approach to quick server setup :)
Appliku doesn’t leave any trace or back door or additional software on your your server. Only ssh authorized keys.
Also none of your data except for build logs and everything related to configuration is stored on our servers either.
It uses docker under the hood, you don’t have to work with docker locally. But your app needs to respect environment variables and have a Procfile in the root with a list of commands to run your app.