How to Build for the Cloud

1. Start with a web app. You build an app that renders a map of fishing spots with a water temperature overlay. You deploy it to Spawned, which automatically builds a Docker image from your source code and serves it as a container at fishmap.spawned.app. At this point your cloud infrastructure is just one ECS container and the networking that Spawned provisions automatically.

2. Add user accounts and saved spots. Users want to save their favorite fishing spots. That means you need a database. You add a Database component to your project — from the canvas, the CLI, or by asking your coding agent — and connect it to your container. On the next deploy Spawned provisions a managed RDS instance and injects the credentials into your app. Your app now has compute and a database.

3. Store large map tile files. You want to save historical water temperature data so users can look back over time. Each temperature map is a large collection of tile files, not the kind of data you put in a database. You add a bucket component and connect your container to it, and Spawned provisions the S3 bucket and hands your app its name.

4. Fetch temperature data on a schedule. The temperature data needs to update every hour. That is a scheduled job, not something your web server should handle. You write a small function that fetches the data and add it as a Function component with an hourly schedule. Spawned provisions a scheduled cron job that runs on the hour.

You now have a container serving the web app, a database for user data, a bucket for large files, and a serverless function running hourly. All declared in one infra.json and provisioned by Spawned.