I've been surprised at how much I like Rust for backend work, but looking at the read me I have no idea what the case for this tool is. What do you use it for?
It let's you deploy apps quickly and manage infrastructure without having to battle the AWS console and/or config files. A simple server (via most Rust frameworks) can be deployed by utilizing an annotation and then running `cargo shuttle deploy` whereas adding a resource, like a Postgres database for example, is also a matter of adding an additional annotation.
Glad Im not the only one. I checked out their examples repo, and Im still very confused as to what the library does. The shuttle runtime trait has me very confused as the API is built on Rocket.
I would generally try to characterize Shuttle as "the Vercel of Rust", though I guess that might not explain much to people that don't know what Vercel does.
That it's for toy projects. Using annotations to provision infrastructure hides complexity from you, but that complexity is what's required to actually manage and resolve infrastructure issues in production. In a prototype or toy project, sounds great.
This argument can be made at any level of abstraction I think.
For example, you can make the same case for AWS Lambdas abstracting the infrastructure away from you, or VMs that run on-top of a hypervisor abstracting away the bare-metal servers.
IMO it really boils down to the quality of the implementation of a product and also designing your product such that if users need to debug (which hopefully isn't often) you offer that visibility into the internals.
> IMO it really boils down to the quality of the implementation of a product
I think this is true. But I can understand why people are more skeptical of Shuttle than Lambda. Running a function is a fairly simple task and since lambdas are stateless, it's relatively easily to feel confident about this abstraction. I'm less confident that I won't need to worry about the details of how my database is provisioned, configured, and maintained.
This still seems great for hobby projects. It also seems like it would be relatively easy to transition to something more manual if the need arises.
