Choosing a Deployment Platform for APIs and MVPs#

Picking a deployment platform early in a project matters more than most teams realize. The platform determines your cost floor, your scaling ceiling, your deployment workflow, and how much operational overhead you carry. Switching later is possible but never free – you are always migrating data, rewriting config, and updating DNS.

This guide compares four platforms that cover the most common deployment scenarios: Cloudflare (Workers + D1 + Pages), AWS (Lambda + API Gateway + RDS + S3), Vercel (Pro + serverless functions), and Fly.io (Apps + Postgres). Each has a genuine sweet spot. None is best for everything.

Release Management Patterns#

Releasing software is more than merging to main and deploying. A disciplined release process ensures that every version is identifiable, every change is documented, every deployment is reversible, and failures are contained before they reach all users. This operational sequence walks through each phase of a production release workflow.

Phase 1 – Semantic Versioning#

Step 1: Adopt Semantic Versioning#

Semantic versioning (semver) communicates the impact of changes through the version number itself: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH.