Are there no load balancer replicas? It looks like a single point of failure for the entire service ( and it runs Redis and RabbitMQ - yikes).
There's also 1 person who is the whole company, a single point of failure comes with the territory.
The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
121–130 of 464 posts
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#122I ran a small company like this quite successfully earlier in my career. If you think this is awesome what goes unmentioned is how lonely it can get. Also, any issues you have (business or technology) you bear the brunt of alone. A coworking space doesn't really help either imo, if you like working with others you will miss having coworkers. Just something I think worth mentioning if you think this is something you m…
This feels like bragging but I also run a one man company and the loneliness is what I enjoy most. Granted, I only work from 08:45 to 14:30 and some hours in the evening, because I bring my kids to school and I pick them up in the afternoon, but the hours when I’m alone, I am 100% productive. When the kids are at home I mostly do some kind of manual labor to get some sort of exercise. Right now I’m building a shed. Last year I built my home office/guest house.
To make up for the missing social interaction I play football with friends, do some consultancy jobs on the side and I help where I can with my son’s football club.
This really is my dream job and I enjoy it thoroughly. I have no problems staying motivated and every day I have loads of inspiration.
The moment I lose motivation will be a sign for me to sell everything and start something new. I ran an online marketing company before this and that was really exhausting for an introvert like me. Selling that company was the best decision I ever made, apart from marrying my wife.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#123As a software SaaS CISO, who also pentests and determines partner risk - I take the approach of not sharing such in depth details. Articles like this are fantastic fingerprinting recon for those that look to compromise sites.
Security by obscurity?
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#124[deleted]
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#125I ran a small company like this quite successfully earlier in my career. If you think this is awesome what goes unmentioned is how lonely it can get. Also, any issues you have (business or technology) you bear the brunt of alone. A coworking space doesn't really help either imo, if you like working with others you will miss having coworkers. Just something I think worth mentioning if you think this is something you m…
I'm kind of experencing this right now, a remote worker whose working on a thing solo. Feel like I need to dip back into a team for a while
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#126I thought I was reading my own blog post :) We use very similar tech stack at my current company:
- Ansible for provisioning
- Python/Django for website/api
- VueJS for frontend(where needed, some pages are simple Django templates)
- Celery for background work
- uWSGI and Nginx as servers with AWS Load balancer
- Elasticsearch for search
- Redis for caching
- Postgres with Postgis as main datastore
- Datadog for monitoring
- Cloudflare for DNS
Some differences as I am working with a team:
- We do use multiple branches and git tags for releases. Feature branches are also common as multiple devs maybe working on different features.
- We use Gitlab-CI a lot for testing and auto-deployment(ansible script can be called from our machine as well)
- Terraform for infrastructure provisioning. We have stopped provisioning any AWS service by console. Once the service is provisioned by terraform, ansible takes over.
I have tinkered with Docker, Hashicorp Packer but this setup has been dead simple to reason and scale reasonably well.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#127First, that's a great stack and very well written/presented. One comment - he dismisses serverless as being overengineering . I think the correct POV, moreso for the single-man company, is that running a server to perform a task is the overengineered option. One can see from the snapshot the servers are indeed severely overprovisioned and underutilized. Building an api with api-gateway + lambda is less work than runn…
The lb, 2 web and 3 api frontends?
You'd also see that 7 of his 8 worker boxes are almost at 100%.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#128I love these stories. I'm a one-person company too: contribsys.com. My production server stack is Apache + some Ruby CGI scripts, to serve static files and handle billing webhooks. I spend less than an hour per week on devops maintenance. KISS is the #1 principle when scaling a solo operation.
Hey I thought I recognized that domain, yay sidekiq! Keep up the good work. By the way we're seeing issues with contrast security gem and sidekiq, but we're pushing on contrast not you.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and no. If you already have a lot of experience building apps that run on servers, there's a learning curve to switching to serverless. Is it huge? Not really. But there are certainly pitfalls and best practices to learn about. The costs can be harder to predict, especially when starting out. And the tooling is different (and much less mature). So now you have a bunch of stuff to learn about or consider, or you…
I think, and I'm replying to both above comments, that there's a non-trivial cost reduction + DevOps reduction potential here. Of course, the overarching rule is always "if it works, don't touch it".
How? His boxes are running at 100%.
He might be able save some money by switching to hosted db and maybe run his webservers serverless (and creating some keep-alive triggers).
Nontrivial cost reduction would be switching to a different host instead of aws.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#130Just because I saw you (wenbin) in this thread I thought I'd be helpful: On https://www.listennotes.com/api/pricing/ There's a typo: "Instantly access to 771,769 podcasts" Instantly -> Instant Really enjoyed the post, thanks for sharing.
That's not a typo. They are two different sentences with slightly different meaning.
Access as a noun or access as a verb.