#github-actions

This is a work-in-progress side-project setup for me, at most 4 worker hosts, 1 public box, and 1 monorepo. The aim is to maximize AI subscription usage and hardware usage while minimizing my oversight.

A single cloud server can affordably power a range of services. In many cases, the vertical scalability capabilities of a single host are enough to cover the needs of many business applications for years, if not indefinitely. Deploying on top of plain cloud servers requires more expertise and oversight and has different risks and costs than relying on popular PaaS offerings like Heroku. There are also tools like Dokku that facilitate deploying to a single server with a good developer experience. But let's assume that you don't want to use any of these, but prefer to build your deployment pipeline on top of lower-level building blocks like Terraform, an infrastructure provisioning tool, Docker Compose, a multi-container manager, and GitHub Actions, a CI/CD automation tool. This post shows one way to do that - ok, cheating a little by also relying on Docker Hub, S3, Route53, and Let's Encrypt for convenience, but still keeping recurring hosting costs minimal.

PostgreSQL supports table partitioning, which splits rows into multiple partitions for improved query performance and easier bulk data transfers. Partitioned tables are useful when data are regularly inserted into a table and only recently added rows are selected in active operation. Older table partitions can be detached, archived, and finally dropped. Changes to database schemas in production systems should be managed with schema migrations, version-controlled, and incrementally applied SQL scripts. Repeated schema migrations should be automated to avoid errors, save engineering time, and ensure they are run. GitHub Actions is a CI/CD automation service that executes jobs according to workflow definitions. This post shows how to use GitHub Actions to regularly open pull requests that manage table partition migrations.