Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?

This is a great setup if you work with a lot of clients. Every client we work with wants everything to run on their infrastructure that they provide, and then they provide the weirdest jankiest setup you could imagine. Because of this I keep everything basic if it cant run on a fresh linux install or less (looking at you docker) then its going to cause issues down the line.

My understanding is that with EKS, you still are responsible for parts of the process that are managed under ECS (for example, firewall and security rules as opposed to leaning on ALB and Target Groups in ECS)

I recently started a small project on Azure for something new, but most of my experience is small companies on AWS which is similar.

If you aren’t already comfortable with K8 I wouldn’t use them, there is a learning curve there for sure and not necessary.

I wouldn’t even worry about containers at all unless you are planning on using a managed container service like elasticbeanstalk.

My CI pipeline is almost nothing, just run tests on main and dev commits. I have no deploy pipeline, I choose to actively deploy.

My deployment workflow is a powershell script since I’m on Azure, if it was AWS and I was using plain EC2 instead of a container service I would probably use ansible to avoid having to repeat commands 2-3 times when I deploy something behind a load balancer, but it would be super minimal.

DB backups are super easy to schedule with RDS or similar offerings. For rollback with database changes I would schedule downtime, let your customers know, replace your page with a maintenance banner, do upgrade, test upgrade then repoint site to your running instance.

Overall I echo what many have said, use familiar tools as much as you can, don’t worry about whether what you are doing will scale to even 2-3 people if it costs significant time. Use managed services where possible to save you time, usually the cost isn’t high vs doing it yourself.

I'm afraid after Heroku is not enough for you, if you don't use Kubernetes, you may end up inventing one.

If you need a bit more than Heroku:

1. Try Render[0].

2. If it is not enough, go with any Kubernetes you can afford, any docker registry and Pulumi or Pulumi+Helm[1]. For monitoring you can use either NewRelic[2] or Weave Cloud[3].

3. If you find big cloud kubernetes too expensive, need more bandwidth, or are just willing to try more affordable alternative new players, maybe Civo[4] fits the need.

In my case[5], since I've been bootstrapping for three years, a low-budget setup is key to keeping the lights on. Here are a few constraints I need to satisfy permanently-ish:

- My workload is bandwidth-intensive, so EC2 egress is too expensive for my case and my situation.

- It is not that cheap to run 12 micro-services in any of the existing Heroku-ish platforms, also private networking and routing of my app are a bit above "12 factor" at this point.

- I can't afford the same availability as everyone else: I'm in the business of supporting other apps but I don't want to pass down the cost of AWS, so I can't afford to be "down because everyone else in AWS is down".

- I don't know many things, and until I find PMF, keeping a low-cost setup gives me the resilience that I need as a founder.

Therefore to solve my problem I use an unholy combination of Ansible and Pulumi to manage 3 clusters of Kubernetes for both stateful and stateless workloads.

Why am I doing this to myself? I have mad respect for people who can run things in a VPS, use the hosting daily backup, and don't see the need to apply patches because they're behind Cloudflare; I just can't.

More details:

- Dedicated servers, 32GB RAM, 8 Cores, 500GB SSD(RAID 1), /29 ipv4, 30TB of Bandwidth for $70/mo each. XCP-NG[6] as hypervisor.

- To assign public IP to virtual machines, I run a tiny DHCP ubuntu VM managed by Ansible.

- On top of XCP virtual machines, k3s cluster managed with Ansible.

- To manage XCP and virtual machines, I use Xen-Orchestra[7] managed with Ansible.

- Pulumi+AWS ECR builds and pushes docker images, secret and configuration management using paraphrase secret provider.

- Hashicorp Vault backed by Postgres+AWS KMS managed by Ansible.

- Ansible+Pulumi+Helm to self-host Apache Pulsar with ZFS snapshots, a cron-job and rsync.net alerts. WAL-G+AWS S3 to backup and archive Postgres/TimescaleDB managed with Ansible.

- All logs aggregated by Gelf and Fluentbit into a self-hosted instance of Seq[8] managed with Pulumi+Helm.

- Tailscale between all virtual machines

- DNSimple for domains

- Cloudflare for all things except the self-hosted docker registry.

- Github Actions for CI but not a hard a requirement, I can run ops in my local computer when Github Actions is down.

Cost: $210 /mo.

Estimated cost in AWS: $2,800 /mo

[0] https://render.com

[1] https://newrelic.com/platform

[2] https://www.weave.works/product/cloud/

[3] https://www.pulumi.com/docs/reference/pkg/kubernetes/helm/v3...

[4] https://www.civo.com/pricing

[5] https://widemesh.com

[6] https://xcp-ng.org

[7] https://xen-orchestra.com

[8] https://datalust.co/seq

In what specific ways are you beyond Heroku? I call bullshit on that.

I've got a big client who went from 6 infrastructure engineers to zero. They survived for half a year without any real problem. You either pay a company to manage your infrastructure for you or you pay a person. Devops people are expensive.

Things I've done to automate DevOps Make sure you pay attention to automatic testing and deploys with Ci/CD. I like automated deploys on Gitlab. Trigger staging release on merge into main, and deploy prod on merge from main into a deploy branch. Infrastructure as code with Terraform. K8S is more trouble than it is worth (though it is robust after you invest 3 months into getting it tuned right, although a lot of people make critical mistakes in their config, I've seen a half dozen insane mistakes.)