Blast Off! (with Zeit Now Platform)

We all have great ideas. Yet, only a few of us manage to take them to realization. There're many reasons why it happens. Personally, I would get discouraged by the amount of preparation that is necessary to be done in order to start working on that next billion dollar idea. There're the learning curves of the technologies that I need to know first. Then I need to get my environment setup to start coding. At the same time, I need monitoring to put in place to collect statistics and benchmarks. The unit tests, integration tests, QA, CI/CD Pipelines, hosting... bah! what's on Netflix?

Some things cannot be avoided and you just need to go through them, others can be simplified. In this article, I'd like to concentrate on one part and get it out of the way to productivity. It's taking your code from the repo and deploying it. After working in DevOps for the past three years, I've been convinced that the manual work of a coder should end after the Git Push/Merge.

Therefore, I needed a solution that deploys the code from Git to a cloud environment without any intervention on my part. I wanted to avoid tinkering with Azure, Google, or AWS. Even Digital Ocean, that is as simple as one click and ssh was still too time-consuming.

Yesterday, I discovered Zeit Now and instantly fell in love. Zeit's other products are Next.Js and Hyper

So what is Now? In words of Zeit "Now is a global deployment network built on top of all existing cloud providers. It makes teams productive by removing servers and configuration, giving you a seamless developer experience to build modern scalable web apps."

How easy is it to use?

1. Login/Register with GitHub at Zeit Login
2. New Project
3. From Template select React*
4. Give a name to the Repo and submit.
5. A few seconds later, you got it online. Here's mine (https://dev-to-react-now.rommik.now.sh)

You're online!

*Because it's so hot (apparently). Feel free to use another template :)

Oh, did I mention it is free? Yup!

There's a ton of other things you can do with Now Platform. I'll let you discover it yourself. Their documentation is detailed, consistent and clear. They are working on integration with other tools like Slack, CloudAMQP, and MongoDB Atlas. You can suggest integrations as well.

Searching "Zeit Now" (https://dev.to/search?q=Zeit%20Now) on dev.to brings back a few tutorials, and the web has more.

Overall, I was pleased with my experience on this Platform. It is easy to use, quick to set up, it's free to start, and the prices are affordable and scale with the resource demand. Give it a try.

P.S. Zeit doesn't know me and I get nothing in return for this article.