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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?

#31

Post by jon-wood »

I have no idea why there's nothing here saying "don't". Go and get a Heroku account, hook it up to your Github repository's master branch for deploys, use Github Actions for CI, and then get on with life.

Yes, you'll pay more for a Heroku Postgres instance than you would for a VPS on Digital Ocean with Postgres running on it, likewise you'll pay more for Heroku Dynos than another VPS to run your application server. On the other side though, your backup, rollback, deploy, and scaling strategies can all be "Heroku does that", and you can focus on the much more valuable job of building a business.

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

#32

Post by iKevinShah »

scottydelta wrote: post #20

I have been working on https://quantale.io since a year and half. It's a web based alternative to Bloomberg Terminal. I personally manage the CI/CD infra as well as the data infrastructure for my startup. Here is my setup: 1. Self-hosted Drone.io instance connected to github(the instance is behind a firewall and can only be accessed via a self-hosted VPN. Github IPs are whitelisted so that auto build/deployment can b…

> 2. Self-hosted production and staging server that hosts my web/django app. It has a local postgres db and is encrypted and backed up on S3 every hour.

Did you have any instance where you needed to restore the DB / Have you done restoration tests to ensure this is a feasible solution? Also, since you are using local postgres DB, do you not run into issues like transaction id wraparound ?

Also, how many days of backup you keep on S3? Considering you create 24 backups a day.

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

#34

Post by davedx »

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…

> 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), runs npm install, runs database migrations and restarts with pm2

So running my entire CI pipeline in terminal is: ./build.sh && ./deploy.sh

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

#35

Post by wjd2030 »

Devops is a culture, not a verb. Success generally being measured by 4 key metrics:

Lead time to change Deployment Frequency Mean time to restore (MTTR) Change Failure Rate.

Though it often is, I do not believe it should be used interchangeably to refer to a suite of tools designed to enable CI/CD and SDLC Lifecycles.

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

#36

Post by q-base »

Sounds like you are overthinking and/or over engineering it. Unless CI or deploy/rollback functionality IS your product then it does not matter. Until you have got traction for your actual product then deployments can have 100 manual steps that you can write down and follow - it does not matter.

I have no idea what you are building or planning it to be but for my projects I have a single VPS with Hetzner per project running linux and hosting the applications. Deployment is done by a powershell script that copies files from my laptop to the server - that's it.

If I were to think about clusters, cloud instances, load balancers and what not then I would be scared away before having delivered anything of value. Cross that bridge when you get there.

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

#38

Post by bizzleDawg »

jon-wood wrote: post #31

I have no idea why there's nothing here saying "don't". Go and get a Heroku account, hook it up to your Github repository's master branch for deploys, use Github Actions for CI, and then get on with life. Yes, you'll pay more for a Heroku Postgres instance than you would for a VPS on Digital Ocean with Postgres running on it, likewise you'll pay more for Heroku Dynos than another VPS to run your application server. O…

This! Plus it includes SSL provisioning, staging environments, background workers etc.

Other competitors like render.com are starting to look like they'll be competitive on features and are way cheaper too.

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

#40

Post by Layvier »

I've been using a simple circle CI setup and AWS beanstalk on my side, and for the databases I only look for fully managed. I've had a few issues with beanstalk but it still saved me a lot of time, and it's pretty easy to find AWS credits. It's pretty good also to avoid wasting time on SSL setup as everything is integrated (if you use a load balancer) with Route 53 and ACM. Beanstalk uses application version so it's very easy to rollback to a previous version. I never liked DevOps much so this setup works pretty well for me, and seems quite scalable as well.

If you're not very comfortable with k8s yet I really wouldn't recommend you to setup a cluster for a small project.

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