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JustinM's avatar

Licensing/Deployment solutions?

TL;DR: what are the options out there when looking for an automated setup/deployment system for licensed copies of PHP/Laravel applications short of reinventing the wheel and building a 100% in-house envoyer.io type solution.

Hi All, this is more of an advice request, than a specific issue.

Over the past few years we've been building an application our company uses for its day-to-day operations. Now that it's quite robust we are looking to license the software to similar businesses, and are in the planning stages of how deploying their copy of the application to shared server pools will work.

Currently we use AWS EC2 Instances managed by forge for simplicity. We set up a load balancer in our VPC which contains a couple app servers and a single CPU optimized queue worker server per "server pool" These servers then get deployments via envoyer.io when we push to our production branch.

For licensing my thoughts are to create an admin/licensing portal where an employee can collect client info to enter into a multi-part form. Once all info is collected the licensing portal would then create the database in our AWS Aurora cluster, then using Forge's API it would create a site on the servers for that pool, to which it would then create a project in envoyer using its API, generate a .env file with the client specific information and then trigger the first deployment to the servers.

Behind the scenes in the admin side of the portal we could manage said server pools so that we can scale them or create new pools in different regions etc. This would then be the link between adding a project to envoyer via the API and associating the correct servers with that project based on the clients region and current server pools workloads etc.

My main question now is, before I go off researching/building/testing all of this, does it sound like the best solution? are there other purpose built solutions out there that would be better/easier? One worry I have is that we may be relying on too much 3rd party services. Like what happens if Forge or Envoyer get shut down or become cost prohibitive for us, or something else happens like the API changes and a feature we need is removed, etc.

Thank you for any suggestions related to this matter.

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