Hey everyone, new here and trying to get my bearings. I've been reading a lot of these migration stories – super helpful for understanding the real-world snags.
My situation: a friend and I are building a small web app as a side project. We're hosting it on AWS (EC2 and RDS) but watching every penny. We're currently just manually SSH-ing to deploy, which is... not great. We want to set up a proper, simple CI/CD pipeline. Our needs are basic: run tests on push to main, build a Docker image, and deploy it to our single EC2 instance.
I've been looking at the free tiers of the big names (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI). On paper, they all seem like they could work. But I'm getting tangled in the details and I'm cautious about hidden costs or complexity.
My main questions are:
- For a tiny, low-budget AWS setup, which free platform has the least friction for secrets management and deployment to a bare EC2? I'm a bit nervous about securely handling AWS credentials.
- How painful is the initial pipeline translation? We have no existing config, so we're starting from scratch, but we're not CI/CD experts.
- Any gotchas with the free tiers that might bite us later? Like, do build minutes run out quickly for a two-person project with a few commits a day?
Really appreciate any wisdom from those who've walked this path before. Just trying to avoid a classic "newbie trap" while keeping things dead simple. 😅