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Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?

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Re: Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?

#31

Post by tootie »

infecto wrote: post #17
cjk2 wrote: post #11

Killer one that has shafted us is tying everything into popular deployment and CI tooling. Your product should be buildable, deployable and tested on a standalone workstation at any time. We have lost literally days fucking around with broken products which get their tentacles into that shit. I'd use AWS + ECR + ECS personally. Stay away from kubernetes until you have a fairly large deployment as it requires huge adm…

ECS is the way imo. I dislike the complexity in auth around cloud services but ECS is a really nice way to build scalable systems cheaply. I am a big fan of using the underlying Fargate spot machines within ECS.

I love ECS. But I'd also tip my cap to Azure App Service. They're both full flexible models that utilize the core services of public cloud but limit your exposure to the bare necessities.

CDN->Load Balancer->autoscale docker->database. That serves 90% of use cases but you'll have access to the myriad other services they offer for anything else that comes up.

Re: Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?

#32

Post by verelo »

infecto wrote: post #17
cjk2 wrote: post #11

Killer one that has shafted us is tying everything into popular deployment and CI tooling. Your product should be buildable, deployable and tested on a standalone workstation at any time. We have lost literally days fucking around with broken products which get their tentacles into that shit. I'd use AWS + ECR + ECS personally. Stay away from kubernetes until you have a fairly large deployment as it requires huge adm…

ECS is the way imo. I dislike the complexity in auth around cloud services but ECS is a really nice way to build scalable systems cheaply. I am a big fan of using the underlying Fargate spot machines within ECS.

I inherited a project on fly.io but before that I’ve used ECS as my primary platform. While ECS is kubernetes lite, fly is ECS but a little more dev friendly in the realm of not dealing with the complexities of IAM etc. It has other downfalls, but it’s the sweet spot for my early stage products right low…although i do expect I’ll end up on ECS if this is going well a year from now.

Re: Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?

#33

Post by ElevenLathe »

cebert wrote: post #22
tj1516 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understood. But what if you have a multi-cloud setup or you want to migrate to a different cloud to efficiently use credits?

I personally think multi-cloud is over hyped and the complexity isn’t worth it for most organizations. The apps I am responsible for are one AWS region / 3 AZ and we have sufficient uptime. We could be multi-region but the added cost wasn’t worth the benefit and complexity. Multi-cloud makes zero sense.

Multicloud makes sense once you get to megascale where you have a dedicated team negotiating with CSPs over your discounts. If you can credibly flip a switch and move your multi-million dollar workload to a competitor, you can save big money.

This comes on top of the benefit that architecting for multi-cloud at that scale usually forces you to simplify/rationalize/automate ruthlessly and so is probably beneficial for a "mature" org with lots of cruft anyway.

That said there may only be a few dozen companies in the world where this makes sense. I happen to work for one, but most engineers don't. Even then, this is at the extreme right of the maturity curve, meaning that there is lots of lower-hanging fruit to pick first

Re: Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?

#34

Post by sanderjd »

cjk2 wrote: post #11

Killer one that has shafted us is tying everything into popular deployment and CI tooling. Your product should be buildable, deployable and tested on a standalone workstation at any time. We have lost literally days fucking around with broken products which get their tentacles into that shit. I'd use AWS + ECR + ECS personally. Stay away from kubernetes until you have a fairly large deployment as it requires huge adm…

> Also stay the hell away from anything which is not portable between cloud vendors.

Doesn't ECS violate this? This is something I've preferred in theory about kubernetes. At least in theory, it's supported everywhere. But I have also wondered whether it would be just as "easy" in practice to move from ECS to another cloud, as it is with EKS. (That is, neither would actually be easy.)

Re: Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?

#35

Post by jmstfv »

I run a profitable SaaS business all on my own.

Keeping it very simple: I push code to Github; then Capistrano (think bash script with some bells and whistles) deploys that code to the server and restarts systemd processes, namely Puma and Sidekiq.

The tech stack is fairly simple as well: Rails, SQLite, Sidekiq + Redis, and Caddy, all hosted on a single Hetzner dedicated server.

The only problem is that I can't deploy as often as I want because some Sidekiq jobs run for several days, and deploying code means disrupting those jobs. I try to schedule deployment times; even then, sometimes, I have to cut some jobs short.

Re: Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?

#36

Post by scaryclam »

Number one would be: tying your deployment to the cloud providers way of doing things. ECS, CodeDeploy, heroku.... it's easy to get stuck when your ops requirements grow beyond how they do things, and really hard to set up something more agnostic alongside it (especially when you have a tight budget on cloud resources).

Number two: using tech that you really don't need. Keep it simple, even if it means not using something that the rest of the industry is in love with. Figure out what your requirements are, pick the simplest way of setting it up (keeping #1 in account, because using tooling that isn't able to grow with you is worse IMO), and keep it agnostic. Then when you start to hit the edges of the capabilities, either scale up your ops understanding and start using more sophisticated things, or hire someone in to help out.

Also, I really do agree with @KaiserPro when they say to separate your infra from your deploy. It makes moving to something else much, MUCH easier when you inevitably need to.

Re: Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?

#37

Post by margorczynski »

dewey wrote: post #21
bionhoward wrote: post #13

I’d argue the obvious answer is address the lack of great answers for declarative schema migration in PostgreSQL. There is Skeema https://github.com/skeema/skeema but it doesn’t support Postgres and Prisma iirc forces you into an ORM, atlas looks perfect but has a nonstandard license.

We have been using https://www.red-gate.com/products/flyway/ with Postgres (via CloudSQL) for at least 8 years and are happy with it. Now that I looked at the website to share the link, I would probably be scared away because it looks very enterprise and corporate but it works well and it's just a Docker container built in CI and I don't have to interact with it.

I've used Flyway and it works great, can also recommend Alembic from the Python world - https://alembic.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/

Re: Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?

#39

Post by jeffrallen »

Pay attention to data sovereignty. Think about what you'll do if your customers or your regulator ask you to keep data in their jurisdiction.

"In the cloud" has recently come to mean "NSA gets a copy of whatever they want" unless you choose wisely.

Re: Ask HN: Startup Devs -What's your biggest pain while managing cloud deployments?

#40

Post by djboz »

verelo wrote: post #32
infecto wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECS is the way imo. I dislike the complexity in auth around cloud services but ECS is a really nice way to build scalable systems cheaply. I am a big fan of using the underlying Fargate spot machines within ECS.

I inherited a project on fly.io but before that I’ve used ECS as my primary platform. While ECS is kubernetes lite, fly is ECS but a little more dev friendly in the realm of not dealing with the complexities of IAM etc. It has other downfalls, but it’s the sweet spot for my early stage products right low…although i do expect I’ll end up on ECS if this is going well a year from now.

If the rest of your infra is on AWS(e.g., S3/RDS/Dynamo), why not just start with ECS? Egress fee's would seem to take a toll after a bit using Fly.io
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