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

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

#41

Post by lbriner »

Like most others said, if its not a painpoint now, just deploy manually and keep it simple. You will save time and money and more importantly, you can concentrate on what is important for early-stage companies: Nailing product-market fit so you can get the sales moving in.

It isn't that hard, for someone with decent experience, to setup TeamCity/Jenkins/Octopus/Whatever but why spend the time? If you change something, you then have to go and spend time changing the automatic deployment.

As someone else said, Devops is about velocity with quality, if velocity is OK and quality won't improve with tooling, don't bother.

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

#42

Post by jamesmishra »

I wrote https://provose.com/ so I could quickly set up databases, containers, and filesystems on AWS. I wrote Provose because I needed to deploy a ton of infrastructure to AWS as a solo developer, but I could not afford to use a dramatically more expensive PaaS like Heroku.

Provose is an open source project written in pure Terraform, so all of the high level abstractions are computed locally, and in general do not raise your AWS bill.

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

#43

Post by tmcw »

bizzleDawg wrote: post #38
jon-wood wrote: post #31

I have no idea why there's nothing here saying "don't". Go and get a Heroku account, hook it up to your Github repository's master branch for deploys, use Github Actions for CI, and then get on with life. Yes, you'll pay more for a Heroku Postgres instance than you would for a VPS on Digital Ocean with Postgres running on it, likewise you'll pay more for Heroku Dynos than another VPS to run your application server. O…

This! Plus it includes SSL provisioning, staging environments, background workers etc. Other competitors like render.com are starting to look like they'll be competitive on features and are way cheaper too.

Yep! Used Heroku at a previous gig (now a mid-size startup), worked great, now on Render.com and it's also great. Also factor in fly.io and railway as quickly-growing platforms in the same PaaS sort of space.

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

#44

Post by oauea »

martijnvds wrote: post #30
oauea wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re using fewer than like 10 boxes and don’t work with many people, you can get away with spooky arcane oldhat sysadmin deploy techniques (scp release to prod hosts, run deploy script, service or cron to keep running) If you have multiple people on the team that have access to servers, this will shoot you in the foot a year or two later. Good luck replicating that server setup when no one has any clue whatsoe…

Next step up is something like Ansible to manage it all.

Yes. Then you realize that people may still SSH into your servers and manually tweak things when they need the fix "now". So then you start restricting SSH access and forcing everything through Ansible. And now you're deep in deployment best practices again ;)

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

#45

Post by piyiotisk »

I've used this in the past https://github.com/piyiotisk/fieldbot-server/blob/master/.gi...

Basically, building a docker image and server it using Docker compose. Of course you'll need NGINx as a reverse proxy running on the server.

If I do it again I'll use a service like render. Not worth managing this myself.

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

#46

Post by hubarb »

Lots of easy to use CI tools about. Bitbucket, Github both have easy to use config based pipelines/runners. Very little to manage there. Build containers and get somebody else to run them for you. There are lots of options to do that too. There should be very little overhead in managing that.

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

#48

Post by Torwald »

jon-wood wrote: post #31

I have no idea why there's nothing here saying "don't". Go and get a Heroku account, hook it up to your Github repository's master branch for deploys, use Github Actions for CI, and then get on with life. Yes, you'll pay more for a Heroku Postgres instance than you would for a VPS on Digital Ocean with Postgres running on it, likewise you'll pay more for Heroku Dynos than another VPS to run your application server. O…

Exactly. And when you are truly "beyond POC level and beyond heroku (for whatever reason)" then of course it is time to hire people.

I see this all the time. Entrepreneurs trying to solve the people problem by avoidance. The problem with the super efficient player is twofold. First, it's not really scaleable. Second, what if the person gets sick or is in vacation?

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

#49

Post by ArtWomb »

Choose a platform like App Engine. It's auto-scaling. Supports bigtable. And opentelemetry. Manageable from anywhere via Cloud Shell. You can run multiple instances and partition load between them. Even includes a free tier ;)

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/golang-samples

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

#50

Post by malwrar »

oauea wrote: post #44
martijnvds wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next step up is something like Ansible to manage it all.

Yes. Then you realize that people may still SSH into your servers and manually tweak things when they need the fix "now". So then you start restricting SSH access and forcing everything through Ansible. And now you're deep in deployment best practices again ;)

I think you’re describing the growing pains that justify paying the costs of more complicated tooling. The big difference is that instead of needing to figure it out as a solo founder with bigger problems, in this scenario you get to figure it out as a solo founder with a team and presumably some extra $$.
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