Local or Cloud¶

Note

Work in Progress

The choices for developing and deploying web sites are local, vendor cloud services, or a combination of both

Vendor Lock-in¶

Being dependent on a vendor for products or services is vendor lock-in. Switching to another vendor is usually difficult and expensive

Development¶

Open-Source or Proprietary¶

Open-source Software¶

Is code the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute to anyone and for any purpose. It may be developed and supported collective using Git and GitHub. It is not vendor lock-in, but may be technology lock-in

Some web site generator Frameworks require using some flavour of Markdown. I’ve developed and migrated some Web Sites to different frameworks. Converting from on Markdown flavour to another is not automatic, but manageable. Choosing a Markdown based framework will ease technology lock-in.

My preference is using reStructuredText and Sphinx framework. It also supports Markdown. Its syntax is relative easy to read and can be translated to Markdown.

Regardless of the framework used requiring a flavour of Markdown, my experience is embedding HTML with Markdown was necessary every so ofter. Not so with reStructuredText.

Proprietary software¶

Is closed-source or non-free software publishers or another persons retains intellectual property or copyright patent rights. It may be vendor lock-in

Local Development¶

Web site development is not easy. It is time consuming and expensive. Optimizing the development environment is critical. Developers need workstations that are reliable, secure, fast, support large screens, supportable, and work with web software development applications. See Development Hardware for an analysis of vendor products

Open-source Software is downloaded from GitHub. Configuring a workstation with open-source software usually requires some experience using the operating systems command line, git, and GitHub. These skills are also helpful during web development.

Global Development¶

Vendor cloud-based web development service usually only requires a local workstation web browser. Some use Markdown and others use proprietary web development languages. Moving development to another cloud-based web development service, or to a local development environment may be difficult

Deployment¶

Local Deployment¶

Deploying web sites locally was the only option before vendor cloud-based products came online. It requires:

Local servers usually being housed in environmentally and secure environments

Builders and maintainers for installing, trouble shooting, backing up, updating server hardware, operating systems, and web server software

Install and maintain Internet connectivity to servers

Install and maintain developer connectivity to servers

Cloud Deployment¶

Outsourcing web deployment to cloud-based vendor deployment service eliminates the need for local web servers. Netlify is an example of a service

Footnotes:

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