Subtext: From Vibe Coding to Production

AWS vs GCP

Vibe coding is a great way to create web apps if you know what you're doing. But how do you figure out where to deploy your app? AWS or GCP or somewhere else? To make this decision more complicated, each of these cloud providers has many different web services that would all work.

On Monday, I spent about 12 hours creating and deploying a simple web app, called Subtext, from scratch including configuring TLS (SSL) and DNS. My web app is up and running at https://subtext.joemoreno.com. 

Subtext & Steganography

Subtext lets you send a private message hidden inside an ordinary-looking text message.

Technically, Subtext is a steganographic message drop keyed by hash. Steganography is the technique of hiding a secret message inside another ordinary, non-secret message so that nobody knows a message even exists. Unlike cryptography, steganography does not protect data from being read or modified; rather, it conceals the very fact of the secret message's existence.
Creating my web app wasn't difficult but figuring out where to deploy took some research.

Deploying to the Cloud

After I created my app, I needed to figure out where to deploy it so I used AI to create a spreadsheet comparing the different platforms and services. Like most AI conversations, the secret sauce is in the prompt engineering. In other words, asking AI the right questions.

This was my prompt:

Create a spreadsheet showing me the different considerations between deploying my node code on AWS and GCP. 

Column headings to read as follows:

1. Cloud Provider

2. Service Name

3. Scales to Zero (Y/N)

4. Estimate Monthly Cost by service (bandwidth, storage, etc)

5. Time to wake up from cold start

6. Has https

7. Custom Domain Name

8. Deploys to Production from GitHub

9. Degree of Difficulty (1 - 10) to convert code from my current Node to production environment.

The spreadsheet that was generated made the decision a no-brainer: GCP Cloud Run.