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

When you're a tiny team of developers working on something beyond MVP level and beyond heroku — managing your CI, deployments/rollbacks, DBs etc. looks like a nightmare to me without Devops expertise.

I want to understand what kind of challenges you all are facing with regards to this. And any tools, practices, you’ll are using to reduce this pain? Ex- How do you deploy resources? How do you define architecture? How do you manage your environments, observability?, etc.

I think without aws it would be painful to be honest.

Use code pipeline/cloud build then either container registry and ecs or beanstalk.

You get everything you mentioned for free with either set up.

Seriously it takes moments to write terraform or even do it by hand.

To be honest, with Azure Devops platforms, web app instances, containers and deployment slots, its almost bulletproof once you spend the time to get it originally configured. Same with AWS I imagine.

That these days there are only two serious choices: deploy on a single-node Docker/podman machine, or Kubernetes.

I can do both, but for a bootstrapped solo business, Kubernetes is overkill and overengineered. What I would really love is a multi-node podman infrastructure, where I can scale out without having to deal with k8s and its infernal circus of YAML, Helm, etcd, kustomize, certificate rotation, etc.

Recently I had to set up a zero-downtime system for my app, I spent a week seriously considering a move to k3s, but the entire kubernetes ecosystem of churn frustrated me so much I simply wrote a custom script based on Caddy, regular container health checks and container cloning. Easier to understand, 20 lines of code and I don't have to sell my soul to the k8s devil just yet.

Sadly, I don't think a startup can help make this better. I want a bonafide FOSS solution to this problem, not another tool to get handcuffed to. I seem to remember Red Hat where working on a prototype of a systemd-podman orchestration system to make it easy to deploy a single systemd unit into multiple hosts, but I am unable to remember what is it called any more.

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Also, I seem to be an outlier, judging from the rest of the comments, by running on dedicated servers. These days everybody is using one of the clouds and terribly afraid of managing servers. I think it's going to be hard to make DevOps better when everyone is in the "loving" Azure/AWS/GCP embrace: you're basically positioning as their competitor, as the cloud vendor itself is always trying to upsell its customers and reduce friction to as close to zero as possible.

Networking. Especially when you have to combine on-prem with cloud sollutions. At least in Azure it's an outright nightmare with the various private end-points and what not. AWS might be better, I know I much preferred it when we had Route50something instead of the Azure dns thing. Frankly a lot of the IT-operations tools are pretty shitty in Azure, but things like networking is where you are less ok with "winging it".

Well that and the constant cost increases. Container apps in Azure went from around $20-25 to $120 on our subscription. Along with all the other price hikes we're looking to move out of the cloud and go into something like Hetzner (but localized to our country).