Concerning DigitalOcean

I took steps yesterday to push an update of Rootstalk to our production “starter” project on DigitalOcean (DO), and my intent was to make this the last such deployment on DO. I had been thinking for sometime about moving Rootstalk production to Azure App Service where Rootstalk is currently developed. However, after moving my “personal” digital@Grinnell.edu Azure account to “pay-as-you-go” status, the projected monthly cost of services shot up from less than $1/month (mostly for object storage) to something closer to $10 or $15/month.

Consequently, since the “starter” edition of Rootstalk on DO costs NOTHING (other elements of the libraries’ account with DO make the “starter” free to use), and seems to perform just fine, I’ve elected to leave Rootstalk production as it is on DO for the forseeable future.

Concerning Azure

Meanwhile, I will be taking steps to move billing for my Azure account from my personal pocketbook to a formal Grinnell College Libraries credit card (as approved by the Library more than a month ago). In order to minimize the impact of that move, I will eliminate the deployment of the Rootstalk GitHub project’s main branch in an effort to reduce future Azure fees. Going forward this will remove the https://icy-tree-020380010.azurestaticapps.net/ deployment of Rootstalk. Rest assured that test and evaluation (staging) deployment of the project’s develop branch will still be available as an Azure App Service at https://thankful-flower-0a2308810.1.azurestaticapps.net/.

The Azure development changes described above are now reflected in the project’s README.md file.

Matomo On the Scene

In addition to the aforementioned project deployment and account changes, analytics are now being provided for Rootstalk, both production and develop instances, via a new Matomo analytics server with a dashboard at https://analytics.summittservices.com.

That’s all folks… for now.