My first project used Vercel

Yeah Cloudflare offering has become everything I wanted from AWS. So much simpler to deploy a basic full stack app + files. AWS has become considerably more difficult than self hosting.

I really wanted to like Cloudflare Workers and I'm sure there's good technical reasons but the way you need to use a Wrangler project to do standard things like enabling email felt too much like I was about to get locked into the platform. It seemed like the bindings you needed to set for email can't actually be set (or even seen) from the console at all.

> Even though they were containerized with Docker, managing them was still troublesome Did docker make it easier? The only issue I have with PostgreSQL is a bit of migration effort moving to new major versions. > I needed to pass various system and environment variables between services, which was very tedious. Was docker making this harder?

Went through a similar phase, I think a mix of 2. and 3. is good for a small team or solo dev. Im throwing in a bit of homelab as well by adding some action runners and models on my desktop as well. But cloudflare is great value for small teams. Not sure how it as at higher scale. On the topic of env and config. It took me a while to get this write, and maybe overengineered. But I invested a lot of time in trying to standardize env definitions, secrets manager, and per env config definition defined in my nx projects, and consumed by the commands or deployers. As well as pulumi for IaC. I tried a couple of different approaches, but finally I just decided to use typescript as my config language. I use nx project.json but defined using typescript. And just define the env config as typescript functions to be injected to each command or deployment as a pure function of target env.

I've been using CF Workers since 2020 or so. The biggest con is that your app will be coupled to their infra. It's less coupled than eg Firebase but still. For the past 10 years or so I've mostly used Heroku end then Fly. Last year I invested time into switching to self hosting with dokku for new projects. After the initial learning curve it's been great. Honestly don't see the point of using anything else except if I need to run something at the edge.