Deploying a multi-service app to a cloud provider

Question

There are several tutorials on how to deploy a containerized service to the cloud: AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Heroku, and many others all have nice tutorials on how to do this.

However, most real-world apps are made of two or more services (for example a database + a web server), rather than just one service.

Is it bad practice to deploy the various services of a multi-service app to different clusters (eg deploy the database to a GKE cluster, and the web server to another GKE cluster)? I'm asking this because I am finding it very difficult to deploy a simple web app to a single cluster, while I was expecting that once I set up my Dockerfile s and docker-compose.yml everything would work out-of-the-box (as advertised by the documentations of Docker Compose and Kubernetes) and I would be able to have a small cluster with 1 container for my database and 1 container for my web server.

So my questions are:

• Is it bad practice to deploy the various services of a multi-service app to different clusters?
• What is, in general, the de-facto standard way to deploy a web app with a database and a web server to the cloud? What are the easiest tools to achieve this?
• Practically, what is the simplest way I can deploy a React + Express + MongoDB app to any cloud provider with a free-tier account?

Answer 1

Deploying multiple services (AKA applications) that shares some logic between them on the same cluster/namespace is actually the best practice. I am not sure why you find it difficult, but you could take a container orchestrator platform, such as Kubernetes and deploy as many applications as you want - in the same project on the same cluster.

I would recommend getting into a cloud platfrom that serves a Container Orchestrator such as Google Container Engine of Google Cloud Platform (or any other cloud platform you want) and start exploring around. You can also read about containers overall or Kubernetes .

So, practically speaking, I would probably create MongoDB and the express app inside the same namespace (and every other service or application related to the project on another container within the same namespace).