Breaking Free From the Cloud With Kamal: Just Enough Orchestration for Your Apps

The text explores the shift from cloud-based infrastructures to on-premise solutions, highlighting how companies like 37signals and Amazon Prime have realized significant cost savings by moving away from cloud-native applications. It introduces Kamal, a deployment tool designed for containerized applications, which simplifies the process of deploying applications by using Docker containers and Traefik for load management. Kamal operates on the premise of assigning each server a single role, requiring at least two servers for deploying applications and databases separately. The tool supports horizontal scalability and can be integrated into CI/CD workflows for automated deployments, but it does not handle multi-server load balancing or SSL termination, which must be managed externally. Despite its limitations, Kamal offers an efficient and flexible alternative for those looking to maintain the benefits of cloud-native architectures while minimizing costs and vendor lock-in.