Ask HN: What's your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?
As someone who operates a consultancy which has deployed more than 5000+ web apps in the last quarter alone.<p>We exclusively use AWS Lambda, DynamoDB or if the app is complex, we use Amazon RDS.<p>For search - AWS Elasticsearch<p>Our preferred stack is Go + VueJS.<p>WHY GO?<p>It&#x27;s much easier for our senior developers to ramp up a team of 10 developers on Go than say Python or Ruby. Suprinsgly, we have a few guys who are Go experts, they unblock all other developers when it comes to best practices or some weird bugs.<p>WHY VUEJS?<p>It&#x27;s has been a lot easier for us to introduce this to our frontend developers than any other thing.<p>WHY NOT RAILS?<p>We found it difficult to make SPA apps in Rails and ramp period for developers is much higher than Go + Vuejs.<p>WHY NOT PYTHON?<p>I loved Flask but we really need Type checking, we are not able to sleep without it. And Go has enough of what we need. Yes, we&#x27;ve briefly experimented with Haskell, OCaml, Scala etc.... but way difficult for new devs.<p>WHY NOT JAVASCRIPT BACKEND?<p>We found it much easier to write backend code in Go.<p>IDE&#x2F;DEBUGGER<p>I am a pro-VIM user myself but it&#x27;s so refreshing and fun to watch new developers speed up on Gogland IDE and the debugger makes developing in Go much easier. This is something only old languages like Java or C# has. It&#x27;s way more difficult for new developers to pick up Java or C# in our experience. They&#x27;ve way more features which our developers found confusing. So, Go stayed everything else was thrown out including Haskell.<p>VUE CLI<p>We use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vuejs&#x2F;vue-cli" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vuejs&#x2F;vue-cli</a> No it does not require deep knowledge of webpack. There are just a few guys on our team who knows webpack&#x2F;vuejs&#x2F;javascript inside out in extensive details, rest of the developers simply use their custom designed&#x2F;documented template and it satisfies 100% of our frontend needs. They unblock everyone on our team if any developer gets stuck with webpack.<p>DEVELOPERS ARE OUR BIGGEST COST<p>Keep in mind, we do not have access to the best developers at the budget price.<p>TRAINING<p>We give new developers as much help and training as they need. Our developers can call the pro guys anytime (even on weekends) and our senior developers love the respect&#x2F;rewards they get in return.<p>COST<p>AppEngine costs $30 a pop, for 90% apps which receive less than 100 hits a day, it&#x27;s expensive. This is where Lambda wins.<p>CI<p>Multi-tenant CI is still a pain in 2018. Current workflow with Gitlab sucks. We wish we could have a simple file in our repo and make 1 curl call to run the CI without any initial setup. But it will eventually happen.<p>PAYMENT PROCESSING<p>If the SaaS product needs multiple payment methods like Stripe, Braintree, PayPal Bitcoins, Ethereum, Wire Transfer we use <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;killbill.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;killbill.io&#x2F;</a> which is multi-tenant, opensource and self-hosted. Previously, we were using WHMCS, Amember pro, and Chargify but it ended up costing way more and was a lot more fragile at the end, completely failing monkey wrench test and our new developers found it much harder to wrap their head around 3 different products. A customer has to simply enter their API credentials for the respective gateway (Stripe or PayBear or BitPay) and we integrate it in minutes.<p>BIGDATA<p>If we need complex large aggregation, we haul in Athena or BigQuery.<p>Our developers prefer BigQuery but Athena is sometimes cheaper in the long run and makes it way easier to import&#x2F;partition your big data.<p>STREAM PROCESSING<p>If we need anomaly detection or preprocessing of statistics we use Kinesis streams.<p>Because of this setup, we primary run on an army of bootcamp graduates and we are able to provide really cheap service to non-profits and other companies who are not able to afford even a dedicated freelancer.<p>FORGET VALUE, WE WANT TO BE CHEAP<p>&quot;Cheap&quot; is a wrong word to use as a marketer&#x2F;sales guy. But yea, since I am now in technical position, so I remove sales guy hate and wear tech hat, making our creation as cheap, robust and secure as possible while still satisfying the requirements.<p>WHERE IS THE FUN<p>We drive our major profits from AdTech business (which involves stressful high tech stuff but it&#x27;s lot more fun) and consultancy is just to validate our solutions across a large number of our portfolio customers. We&#x27;ve to ensure, their setup is as cheap, robust and secure as possible.<p>IMPROVEMENTS<p>As I want to improve my strategies and methods as much as possible, feel free to challenge my choice. It should not just work for 1 developer but an army of developers and it should make it trivial to add more developers.