Cloud and SaaS
Ship it at the right size.
Most SaaS doesn't need a galleon. I run products on a single Cloudflare Worker, and I ran a live-streaming platform on containers in two regions. Knowing which one you need is most of the job.
Right size
Which ship do you need?
Tick what is true of your product. Leave the rest. The ship follows your answers.
The sloop: one Worker
One deployable, a managed database, and very little to look after. This is where I start, and most products never need to leave.
Bikkel ships its pages, API, auth and billing as a single Cloudflare Worker. Bikkel and MandarinAI both run this way.
Autoscaling
Traffic is weather
Wind rises, ships launch. It calms, they tie up again. A new ship takes a moment to get under way, so I set the rule to act early, and to come back slowly so the fleet doesn't thrash in every lull.
- Ships working
- 1 of 8
- Load per ship
- 0%
- Backlog
- Clear
On Workers the platform does this for you, which is a big part of why I start there. On the live-streaming platform a room could go from quiet to crowded the moment a popular creator went live, so we had to design for it.
A small simulation running in your browser, not a real system.
Canary deploys
Send one ship first
A release goes to one ship. If it comes through the weather, the rest follow one at a time. If it takes damage, the fleet holds and that ship comes home on the old release. One ship takes the hit, and most people never see it.
- On new release
- 0 of 6 ships
- Errors
- None yet, limit 2%
- Fleet on the current release, waiting for you.
Simulated numbers. The same choices always play out the same way.
Multi-tenancy
Many cabins, one hull
Each lit cabin is one customer sharing the same ship: cheap, and simple to run. Until one cabin starts a huge import and the lights dim next door. So you either limit that tenant, or move it to its own boat.
- Neighbours served
- 100% of what they ask for
Companion AI runs 4 live white-label brands from one backend, with the tenant resolved from the request hostname.
A small simulation running in your browser.
Launch yours
Name your product and it goes on the flag. Nothing you type leaves this browser unless you send me the form.
See what is already sailing: the work, or how I keep it up on infrastructure.