Choosing a provider

Loneka’s new cloud service provider is something I put quite a bit of thought into up-front. I needed something that was developer-friendly in the ways that matter in the long run, not just in the moment. I needed something ergonomic as a developer, migration-friendly as a maintainer, and cost-effective at scale as a business owner.

Though I considered a number of open-source “DIY” approaches, I ultimately went with Cloudflare. At the end of the day, I need to ship and maintain this with little overhead, and that’s what’s most important to me.

So I opted for a combination of Cloudflare Workers, Workers Analytics Engine, and DNS. Development was surprisingly fun, and deployment was instantaneous. I can look over application health and usage at a glance, and update it with a simple push to main.

Building a stack

After deciding upon Cloudflare, I had to compile a tech stack for this new cloud architecture. I wanted RESTful API routing, a full-stack frontend in React, and a database solution appropriate for high-level analytics. Furthermore, I wanted to do it in one codebase, with minimal overhead.

I ended up choosing Next.JS as an all-in-one framework, with OpenNext’s Cloudflare adapter to get around Next.JS’ bias towards Vercel deployment. The front-end uses React and Tailwind, while the backend is supported by Next.JS route handlers calling upon OpenNext’s analytics engine API for data ingestion.

Coming soon to Avalog

The new backend architecture is live and currently being integrated with Avalog. The latest development build supports update notices and item curation, but I’m looking into implementing community outfits and developer-facing analytics in the future.

If you spend time browsing Loneka’s software documentation, you may also notice change there. It’s now being routed through Cloudflare DNS under the docs subdomain, and I’m looking into fleshing out page details and SEO.

Stay tuned!
https://loneka.com/suite/discord