Rethinking Stylingmate's infrastructure

The original Stylingmate backend ran on AWS, with EC2 instances handling application requests and WebSocket connections.

It worked, but maintaining infrastructure that needed to stay running even when nobody was using the application came with unnecessary costs and operational overhead.

As I’m rebuilding Stylingmate, I’ve been reconsidering that setup.

The current direction is to move toward Cloud Run for the application backend and Neon for PostgreSQL. The appeal is fairly simple: pay for compute when it’s actually needed and avoid managing an always-running server.

Of course, that introduces other tradeoffs, particularly cold starts, database connections, and how long-running connections behave.

I’m working through those decisions as part of preparing the new infrastructure. The goal isn’t to build something sophisticated for its own sake. It’s to have a backend that’s inexpensive, reliable, and easy to maintain at the product’s current scale.