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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?

#81

Post by a_square_peg »

I run https://oikolab.com - it's a weather data service with global, hourly historical weather data from 1950 to 16-day forecast. It launched about a year ago and I think it's probably the largest data offering of its kind.

I don't have dev ops experience (I still don't know much) so a lot of what I did was to exhaust the limits of the setup before implementing any new infrastructure, sort of learning as I go along, with many 'oh, so that's why they do this' moments. I've read about K8 but still can't see when I would need that though.

A lot of what saved effort for me was to use off-the-shelf component whenever I can. I was quoted $10~20k to build a Django website for user & API management to connect to my back-end but it was much easier to use Azure API Management service (~$400/month), which also came with simple, reasonable looking web front-end that I was able to launch within a week.

Before moving things to cloud (Digital Ocean), I've also exhausted what I was able to do with simple NAS servers (overall I processed about 200TB of raw data with ~1TB/day on-going using what I call a 'poor man's HPC' setup) - luckily I'm based out of Hong Kong so had access to fiber-optic internet at home.

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

#82

Post by sjclemmy »

diiq wrote: post #22

Lots and lots of best practice exists specifically to help teams , and especially teams with some normal amount of turnover. The problems of a solo dev are very different than a dev on a team. Knowledge silos don't exist. Distributed expertise doesn't exist. There's no one to mentor, no shared vision to maintain, no intertia to combat. I consult on big complicated team projects. I also manage multiple solo projects.…

Totally agree with this. I do big corp work and the problem space is totally different from what is needed for a single developer.

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

#83

Post by 1MachineElf »

brightball wrote: post #69
bootwoot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great. Until you need to roll back.

Keep a simple tool like Ansible around for those spooky admin tricks and you can take advantage of the Ansistrano plugins for smooth deploy and rollback (Ruby's great Capistrano tool ported to Ansible). https://ansistrano.com/ It's pretty fantastic.

This looks awesome. I'm currently in the middle of learning Ansible now for my FjeeBSD jails. Have any other plugins to recommend?

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

#84

Post by brightball »

1MachineElf wrote: post #83
brightball wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep a simple tool like Ansible around for those spooky admin tricks and you can take advantage of the Ansistrano plugins for smooth deploy and rollback (Ruby's great Capistrano tool ported to Ansible). https://ansistrano.com/ It's pretty fantastic.

This looks awesome. I'm currently in the middle of learning Ansible now for my FjeeBSD jails. Have any other plugins to recommend?

Anything by geerlingguy on Ansible Galaxy.

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

#85

Post by nkotov »

I had a chance to setup several businesses in the past and to setup the foundation - I ended up writing a lot of templates for myself. Nowadays, if I want to setup a SaaS company, I have 90% of the foundational groundwork covered (AWS, Terraform, CI/CD, Github, etc.)

We're building [1] something similar to solve this problem but just on the infrastructure end. I really believe in the power of templates. In our future release, we're planning on launching a "infrastructure" catalog of commonly used setups so that you can just get the foundation in place. Why re-invent the wheel every time when you can just spin up a boilerplate that gets you 90% of the way there?

[1] https://atomizedhq.com

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

#86

Post by marvinblum »

I found the HashiStack to be manageable by a single person or very small teams. It's easy to set up and hasn't let us down so far. We get away with using shell scripts to test and build our containers for now. The trickiest part is scaling as soon as it becomes necessary. Our current three-node cluster handles a few hundred requests a second without issues, but I migrated the database three times already, and I'm in the progress of migrating it a forth time to a much bigger machine.

You can find more about our setup and ops here: https://pirsch.io/blog/techstack/

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

#89

Post by roland35 »

ignas- wrote: post #21

This seems to (strangely) be an unpopular answer here, but I've spent a weekend to terraform everything. I run a couple of different projects which are yet to pick-up traction, so prototyping quickly is essential. What I have now is terraform on Github which handles Networking (VPC, subnets), ECS/ECR, ALB for my backend and S3/CloudFront for frontend. Everything is on AWS because I'm familiar with it, so it's faster.…

I find this helpful for my side project as well. It's amazing how quickly a) things break down and b) I forget how to set things up and get running again if I have to shelve and restart work on a project.

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

#90

Post by marcosdumay »

bootwoot wrote: post #67
davedx wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spooky arcane oldhat sysadmin deploy techniques (scp release to prod hosts, run deploy script I never realised I was using spooky arcane oldhat stuff! I feel wizardly now. My projects (for small clients and myself) basically use this. - A "build.sh" script that does a local build of back end and front end - A "deploy.sh" script that scp's everything to the server (either a digital ocean VPS or an EC2 instance), run…

This is great. Until you need to roll back.

Why? Checkout what version you want to roll back to, and deploy it.
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