Writing
Moving JobEnvoy from AWS to Scaleway
JobEnvoy is back online, running on Scaleway.
I moved because I wanted to support European providers and privacy initiatives through the services I pay for. Hosting felt like a practical place to start.
Getting there took more work than I expected. There was downtime, an outage, and an experiment with serverless containers that turned out to be too expensive for the workload. I spent a lot of time learning things I already knew how to do on AWS.
Leaving AWS
Section titled “Leaving AWS”JobEnvoy is the job-search and application tool I’m building. It had been running on AWS, a platform I knew well enough to get on with the work.
I hadn’t fully appreciated how much that familiarity helped. I knew where to look, how the services fit together, and which problems I was likely to run into.
On Scaleway, I had to work those things out again. I was learning a new cloud while moving a live product onto it. Planning helped, but plenty of the details only became clear as I tried to get the setup running.
Each difference took time to understand. Tasks that had become routine on AWS needed another round of reading, testing, and troubleshooting.
What the move cost
Section titled “What the move cost”I tried Scaleway’s serverless containers during the migration. For JobEnvoy’s workload, they were too expensive, so I had to change course.
There was also downtime, including an outage. That was the part of the migration people using the product could feel. While I was figuring out the new environment, JobEnvoy wasn’t always available.
The work also took time away from the product itself. I wanted to improve JobEnvoy, but first I had to get it running reliably in its new home.
I still wanted to support a European provider. Doing that meant accepting the time and effort of moving, including the approaches that didn’t work out.
Back to the product
Section titled “Back to the product”The full setup is now running on Scaleway, and I’m getting used to it. I can return to building JobEnvoy.
The move gave me a better sense of what familiarity is worth. Features and prices are only part of an infrastructure decision. The time it takes to learn a platform matters too, especially when you’re responsible for keeping a product online while you learn.
I’ll account for that more carefully next time.
For now, JobEnvoy is running where I wanted it to run. This seemed like a good first post: something I wanted to do, what happened when I tried, and what I learned from it.