I've had an idea for a potential free solution that should be easy to implement if anyone has more time than me:
A one-click setup simple enough for non-technical users.
Instructions should be along these lines:
1. Sign up for AWS if you haven't already got an account
2. Generate a keypair and run our setup/load our template/whatever (I'm a bit hazy on AWS automation but I would imagine there's a fairly obvious way to do this. The new CodeStar thing looks like it might fit the bill)
3. Place this snippet of javascript in your page
The service would use Lambda and DynamoDB to to handle storing/serving the comments. Costs would be fairly minimal for low-traffic sites.
Rough guess is that this would be no more than a few days to a couple of weeks work for someone. Am I over-optimistic?
So either someone does this to scratch an itch or we fund it via Patreon/Kickstarter.
I've had an idea for a potential free solution: www.wordpress.com
Nevermind. It's not an idea, it's a real product.
You're gonna have a very hard time if you want to run instances, lambda and dynamodb in the cloud only to run a blog with comments. First, it's really complex to setup, even for an experienced dev. Second, it's gonna costs a ton of money and you'll be at the mercy of your traffic.
This wasn't a solution for "a blog with comments" - it was a solution for a pluggable comments app that you could add to any site even static html. We were talking about Disqus so I was thinking about what Disqus brings to the table.
> First, it's really complex to setup, even for an experienced dev.
The whole point of the idea was that the setup would be templated. That's why I spelt out the steps I envisaged the end-user having to perform. Did you miss that part?
> Second, it's gonna costs a ton of money and you'll be at the mercy of your traffic.
This depends on traffic and my hunch is that it would be quite affordable for most low/medium traffic blogs. Lambda is dirt cheap and Dynamo has a very generous free allowance. Also see the suggestion below and my reply. The comments section would only need to be generated when a comment was posted and the html fragment could be stored in a free CDN.
This could work, but only if you could automate billing caps too. I imagine for a low-traffic blog this could easily fit within free-tier requirements, but you don't want to suddenly get a bill when a page gets HN'd or something. Ideally the service should just fail when it hits free-tier limits and you can use the local js to display "Comments unavailable due to high traffic" or whatever.
If any of this is not automatable it fails as an idea, because configuring AWS requires a colossal amount of effort from someone who hasn't already used it.
Spending limits are far more complicated than they might seem since these services are designed to be billed by usage and many accrue charges even in a steady state.
What exactly is supposed to happen when the billing limit is hit? Delete everything? That's the only way to actually stop billing completely and I'm not sure who would actually want that.
No service that I know of deletes everything even when there are billing issues. No public access is nearly equivalent from the end user's perspective, and usually there is a grace period before everything is deleted. All in all it is an interesting conflict of interest on the cloud provider's part.
I'd go one step further and would generate structured files with the comments, which are stored in an HTTP-enabled S3-bucket, so the website showing the comments can still rely solely on static resources for comment display and only requires AWS Lambda/DynamoDB for posting new ones.
Great idea. Don't forget that Dynamo has a generous free allowance. I'm not sure how much you'd save. Maybe instead of S3 you could use a free CDN such as Cloudflare.
A one-click setup simple enough for non-technical users.
Instructions should be along these lines:
1. Sign up for AWS if you haven't already got an account
2. Generate a keypair and run our setup/load our template/whatever (I'm a bit hazy on AWS automation but I would imagine there's a fairly obvious way to do this. The new CodeStar thing looks like it might fit the bill)
3. Place this snippet of javascript in your page
The service would use Lambda and DynamoDB to to handle storing/serving the comments. Costs would be fairly minimal for low-traffic sites.
Rough guess is that this would be no more than a few days to a couple of weeks work for someone. Am I over-optimistic?
So either someone does this to scratch an itch or we fund it via Patreon/Kickstarter.