Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 328 posts

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

#21

Post by ignas- »

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. And I compensate for costs with AWS Activate + Free Tier. This combination is usually enough to understand whether the project will get traction or not.

Actually spending little time on IaC was one of the best recent investments. But I guess it holds more value when you have a couple of projects, still exploring and these tasks get repetitive

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

#22

Post by diiq »

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.

On solo projects, deployment is a script I run from my dev machine. I'm the only person who deploys; anything else would be solving a problem I don't have.

The only "CI" is running the tests before I run the deployment script. I'm the only one who needs to see the outcome of the tests. Anything more would be solving a problem I don't have.

Architecture is whatever makes the most sense to me personally -- which is often miles away from what I would recommend to a client, who needs something any new hire will recognize and be able to work with.

I pay a service to manage backups so I can walk away from a solo project for months and know it's ticking away.

The point is: solve problems you actually have. Don't try to run a "professional" operation by doing what big teams do all by yourself. Big teams have different problems.

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

#25

Post by Longwelwind »

I'm not a solo-preneurs, but I have some open-source projects (mainly a live one, and one that I'm currently developping).

Here are the list of DevOpss flow I've done:

* One project is a website. I have a pipeline, triggered when something is merged to master, that builds Docker images, pushes them to a Dokku instance and deploy them.

* One project is a JS library. I have a pipeline, triggered when a git tag is created, that packages the library and uploads it to npm. I use Netlify to host the documentation website of it.

* For this same project, I'm planning to have a pipeline triggered for each PR to run the linter and tests.

I work as a DevOps/MLOps, and I'm quite comfortable with CI tools in general. I hate doing things manually and I love automating, so it comes quite naturally for me to do it. Once it's set up, it rarely needs to be changed.

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

#26

Post by woudsma »

Not a solo-preneur, but I’ve had great experiences so far with Dokku, an open-source Heroku clone. I’m running ~40 apps on my single VPS since a couple of years. I use it in combination with Github Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines and Gitlab CI. I still feel very flexible working with Dockerfiles and different cloud services. I’ve only had to update the dokku-letsencrypt plugin a couple of times in the past 5 years. Note that I haven’t had to protect important databases with PII for example.

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

#27

Post by NomDePlum »

I'm starting to consider this myself and have been looking at https://serverless-stack.com/#guide as a way to prototype and build an MVP. The guide has quite a bit in it that I believe can be repurposed to that end although it doesn't cover backups etc, more integrations with AWS services.

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

#28

Post by noir_lord »

malwrar wrote: post #13

Not a solo founder, but I do a lot of ops professionally. Unless you have a specific reason, I say it’s best to avoid complicated tooling until later. k8s, ci, etc are all really useful and solve a lot of hard problems, but god are they a bitch to set up and then monitor, fix when something weird happens, secure from nasty people outside, patch when some update becomes necessary, resist the urge to “improve”, etc. Th…

Agree with all of this.

If you want an intermediate step you can just make docker images of your application and deploy and run those manually (again with shell scripts).

You can get a long way that way without having to deal with kubernetes.

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

#29

Post by oauea »

malwrar wrote: post #13

Not a solo founder, but I do a lot of ops professionally. Unless you have a specific reason, I say it’s best to avoid complicated tooling until later. k8s, ci, etc are all really useful and solve a lot of hard problems, but god are they a bitch to set up and then monitor, fix when something weird happens, secure from nasty people outside, patch when some update becomes necessary, resist the urge to “improve”, etc. Th…

> If you’re using fewer than like 10 boxes and don’t work with many people, you can get away with spooky arcane oldhat sysadmin deploy techniques (scp release to prod hosts, run deploy script, service or cron to keep running)

If you have multiple people on the team that have access to servers, this will shoot you in the foot a year or two later. Good luck replicating that server setup when no one has any clue whatsoever about all the small tweaks that were performed ad-hoc over the years.

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

#30

Post by martijnvds »

oauea wrote: post #29
malwrar wrote: post #13

Not a solo founder, but I do a lot of ops professionally. Unless you have a specific reason, I say it’s best to avoid complicated tooling until later. k8s, ci, etc are all really useful and solve a lot of hard problems, but god are they a bitch to set up and then monitor, fix when something weird happens, secure from nasty people outside, patch when some update becomes necessary, resist the urge to “improve”, etc. Th…

> If you’re using fewer than like 10 boxes and don’t work with many people, you can get away with spooky arcane oldhat sysadmin deploy techniques (scp release to prod hosts, run deploy script, service or cron to keep running) If you have multiple people on the team that have access to servers, this will shoot you in the foot a year or two later. Good luck replicating that server setup when no one has any clue whatsoe…

Next step up is something like Ansible to manage it all.
Post reply on HN