Hosting Harker: Our Software Infrastructure Journey

As part of Harker's roadmap to launch, I was tasked with setting up the infrastructure that Harker will run on. I had previous experience with software infrastructure tools before so I was familiar with best practices, however, choosing the correct infrastructure requires extensive research and team discussions.

We wanted to ensure we got this right from the start, rather than having to fix problems later down the line. The initial plan was to host everything in AWS, however, this solution seemed costly and time consuming, instead I was tasked with researching Microsoft’s Azure services due to the cost effectiveness of Azure, particularly with their Azure for Start-ups offer.

Generally, in hosting infrastructure there are many possible services that will achieve a fully hosted version of your application, but they come with their own strengths and weaknesses. I managed to setup a fully hosted version of Harker in Azure using various service offerings, but hosting an application is only one part of setting up robust infrastructure.

A key challenge is setting up monitoring tools to ensure a healthy application, this can become time consuming for platforms like Azure that, whilst do provide an incredible depth of monitoring tools, require you to do all the setup. This is where the suggestion was made in our team for hosting part of our app in Fly.io. This approach is more expensive than Azure, however, it provides all of the extensive monitoring necessary from the start, freeing up our developers to spend more time building Harker features.

Another concern we had was where to host the frontend side of our app, since we already use Cloudflare at Harker. We made the decision to host our frontend in Cloudflare due to the cost and reliability of hosting with one of the most prominent internet security providers.

Finally, we still have our databases hosted in Microsoft Azure due to the reliability of being provided for by Microsoft and the robust network security they provide to ensure that nobody can access Harker’s sensitive data.

Despite previous experience in cloud infrastructure, I learnt a lot through this process about Azure, Fly.io and Cloudflare and the different advantages providers have. The rest of the team and I are confident in our infrastructure setup being secure and effective for serving our users.

Infrastructure was a key element to get right to enable Harker to launch successfully, which is slated for the start of April. If you're interested in seeing a live demo of Harker, taking advantage of our infrastructure, drop us a line.