Quick and Continuous Deploy: Netlify vs AWS Codestar

In an earlier post , I have documented the steps to host your node application with https using AWS EC2 and AWS CloudFront. For some of us who just want a quick experiment, those steps might appear a little tedious. Fortunately, there’re other options. In this post, I will talk about two of them: Netlify and AWS Codestar. Thanks to one of the team members that pointed me to Netlify!

Netlify

Using deployment of a React application as an example, it took me less than 5 minutes with a few commands (you can also do this on the netlify user interface as well).

npm run build (building the React App)

netlify init (assuming you already installed netlify-cli by npm -g netlify-cli)

netlify deploy (you specify ./build as the publish directory)

That’s it. A few minutes later, you have a website hosted using https https://<xxx>.netlify.app. Of course, you can add custom domain, etc. Netlify also comes with features such as continuous deployment, domain hosting, etc. But those are optional if your intent is to have a quick deploy for experimentation purpose.

In terms of pricing, for simple member, it’s pretty much free up to some limit. https://www.netlify.com/pricing/ for more information. Given the short…