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Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#81

Post by faeyanpiraat »

Your main concern is of course limited time/resources, so you'll have to make compromises.

The question is not whether your system will fail, the question is when.

Have proper monitoring and alerting in place.

But don't over engineer it, sometimes everything seems technically fine, but your support inbox will start getting user complaints.

Resolve the issue, figure out the root cause, make sure this or similar stuff won't happen, apologise to the affected users if necessary, and move on.

You'll learn waaay more failure modes of your application running in the wild, than just thinking about "what could go wrong".

It's a long game of becoming a better developer/devops guy, and not repeating the same mistakes in the future.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#82

Post by outime »

If you’re using AWS I want to assume you didn’t go for a cheaper solution (e.g. VPS from a reputable company) because you like the managed solutions that they provide, among other reasons.

I assume also you want a simple way to increase reliability while keeping costs within reasonable limits.

Well, AWS can give you all that if you don’t want to go super fancy. Check Beanstalk to get something simple and reliable. Monitor using CloudWatch. Make sure to leverage redundancy options (multi az, multi region if worth it, etc). These are some general tips but with the information that you provide that’s all I can say.

You can also pay a consultant to get a review of your setup and get some recommendations. It won’t be cheap but it depends how much you value your time and your product.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#86

Post by aantix »

dkersten wrote: post #14

Most of the suggestions here is suggesting ways of restarting services when they go down, which is a good start, but that doesn't actually solve the issue I hit last night... My system integrates with an external system and what happened is this external system started sending me unexpected data, which my system wasn't able to handle, because I didn't expect it so never thought to test for it -- the issue was that I…

If you're monitoring runtime exceptions in production, you should be able to set alerts with your exception logging system. Here's how to do it for Sentry. https://sentry.io/_/resources/customer-success/alert-rules/

Re: Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

#87

Post by tabakd »

ryanolsonx wrote: post #80
cddotdotslash wrote: post #10

Back when I was working on everything myself, I deployed everything through AWS Lambda and API Gateway, with all my static assets on S3 and CloudFront. I had exactly zero infrastructure issues over the course of two years and never dealt with security patches, SSH'ing, etc. If I were doing billions of requests, it may not have been the most cost effective, but it helped me scale without worrying about typical devops…

How do you keep things fast? Lambda functions can have cold starts that introduce latency. How do you manage that? (From my small amount of experience - please prove me wrong.)

It will only cold start the first time. You also need to make sure that if your lambda can reuse the existing db connection when receiving multiple multiple requests to save time.
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