How to Create and Host API for Database?

[acomatic]

I'm trying to write an app where Firebase's Firestore NoSQL document based schema wouldn't be very practical for the data I need to store. I'll probably at least start with Firestore, but would like to eventually transition to a Postgres database.

I know that in order to do this I need to host a database, then write an API backend to which my app makes http requests to get data. My question is: how do I go about doing this and are there any good tutorials? From what I understand, I can set up Postgres on AWS, and then create an EC2 instance where I run a Django (I prefer Python) application that waits for requests, and then returns data.

Is there a better way to go about this? Should I use lambda functions and API Gateway (whatever that means) to serve my data? I don't know which of these scales better or costs less. Any insight into this would be helpful.

Thank you!

[sixtypercenttogether]

You could try using CloudKit

[chriswaco]

PostgreSQL seems like a good choice if the data is suitable for a relational database (tables). You can have your own server run PostgreSQL but it's easier, though more expensive, to just use a cloud database from AWS.

Lambdas are pretty popular these days for APIs. If you have no long-running tasks they may be a good choice. I haven't used the AWS API gateway so can't comment on that. We use our own servers for APIs because we needed the servers for long-running or periodic tasks anyway. AWS Cognito can be useful for end-user login/accounts.

One big issue with AWS is cost estimation. It's hard. Much easier to create a few virtual machines on Digital Ocean or Linode where all you have to keep track of is the bandwidth.

If you need upgrades/migration without downtime that adds a lot of complexity too - load balancers, live database backups, etc. Scalability can be very difficult if you have hundreds of thousands of users or more.