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

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

#1

Post by aristofun »

When you're 1 man show (or tiny team) working on some web oriented application beyond POC level and beyond heroku (for whatever reason) — managing your CI, deployments/rollbacks, DBs etc. looks like a nightmare to me.

Just properly setting up and maintaining a small k8s cluster looks almost like a fulltime job.

I wonder how do your CI, deployment workflows look like?

Any particular tools, practices, guidelines, architecture patterns to reduce pain & timewaste?

How do you CI => deploy/rollback stateless instances? How do you manage your DBs and backups? Etc.

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

#2

Post by herbst »

I do it KISS. Deployment for me is always a git hook, usually with a private gitea server. So I have versioning and rollbacks available with a cute UI if necessary.

DBs run side by side and are simply backed up regularly with whatever backup solution the VPS offers.

That's it.

Out of school I put way more effort in building my infrastructure but in reality a good VPS, something like Cloudflare and some app based caching can run millions of daily views over 20+ different apps without issues.

Edit:// it's mostly rails apps I host btw. For my wordpress installs i use dedicated VPSes because those scale horrible.

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

#3

Post by cpursley »

That's easy, Render.com (it's like if Heroku were designed in 2021, and a lot cheaper). And can handle docker and distributed Elixir out of the box as well as free static sites). Took me just a few hours at most to set up and has been very reliable (I think it's k8s on Google Cloud under the hood but it's all abstracted away).

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

#5

Post by iKevinShah »

herbst wrote: post #2

I do it KISS. Deployment for me is always a git hook, usually with a private gitea server. So I have versioning and rollbacks available with a cute UI if necessary. DBs run side by side and are simply backed up regularly with whatever backup solution the VPS offers. That's it. Out of school I put way more effort in building my infrastructure but in reality a good VPS, something like Cloudflare and some app based cach…

> Out of school I put way more effort in building my infrastructure but in reality a good VPS, something like Cloudflare and some app based caching can run millions of daily views over 20+ different apps without issues.

I read such messages (and also agree to it mostly) and then I encounter my peers wanting active-active clusters with K8s on top or something and I feel I like a dinosaur.

Refreshing to see KISS still being used. Also gitea. What an awesome piece of open source software.

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

#7

Post by twobrainy »

I pay money so I can sleep easier at night!

Envoyer and Forge for PHP stuff.

Render/Heroku for node.js stuff. Netlify for static stuff.

For the more complex bits I have, I use Pulumi to manage everything through IaC. It's still complex but at least it's robust and I can sense-chech changes to infra through a PR to myself.

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

#8

Post by prohobo »

I've been using Beanstalk for my new project, which is like an in-between for full on AWS and Heroku, but if you need you can decompose it into individual AWS components. It's more difficult to get started and there are way less sensible defaults, but I still got everything deployed for my POC in less than 4 hours.

As for DBs / engines and such, I try to go for hosted services as long as they're not stupidly priced. I'm currently using Elastic cloud. If I need a relational DB I'll probably deploy Postgres on AWS and install some scripts to back up the data to an S3 bucket every day or so.

I chose NOT to use k8s or Docker because, like you said, it's basically a fulltime job to maintain. I don't think it's needed at all unless you're a large organization.

So basically: a mixture of roll-your-own, streamlining platforms, and hosted services. Do whatever works and is easiest, and don't worry so much about having ALL the goodies.

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

#9

Post by fxtentacle »

I run my own Heroku clone which is then licensed by my other companies.

Also, I review how much time each product / feature consumed each year and then decide what to deprecate. Each April I then have my own little party where I ceremoniously turn off last year's time wasters.

I'd say it all boils down to "know your customer lifetime value"

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

#10

Post by lbayes »

Ex-Googler here and 20+ year veteran of SF startups.

It sounds like you have a great set of intuitions, and you're right, all that infrastructure is a nightmare to set up and manage.

Step 1: Question every requirement

Step 2: Drop everything that is not critical

Step 3: Profit!

Git hooks and Makefiles are great!

I have an HP workstation I bought from eBay under my desk that has 32GB of RAM, 2x 12 core CPUs and a static IP address. It's probably 8 years old, but fast enough to serve whatever we need for a long while.

The machine (Old Blue), hosts our Git repos, web app, database and integration service (git hook that calls, 'make publish').

We're not serving Google scale traffic, so we don't need Google scale infrastructure.

Keep it simple whenever possible and don't let the modern stack complexity creep in until you absolutely need it.

Even going to the cloud, when you've done it 10 times and know how, is way more work than you need when just starting out.

Take on those costs and complexities only when your traffic requires it, and you may just find out that you never have to pay rent for compute.

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