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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?

#51

Post by jayair »

NomDePlum wrote: post #27

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.

Yup it's meant to be a starting point for projects of all sizes. We built our own stuff using it as well. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Or join us on Slack: https://launchpass.com/serverless-stack

Good luck!

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

#52

Post by BiteCode_dev »

ArtWomb wrote: post #49

Choose a platform like App Engine. It's auto-scaling. Supports bigtable. And opentelemetry. Manageable from anywhere via Cloud Shell. You can run multiple instances and partition load between them. Even includes a free tier ;) https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/golang-samples

You did that, as a solo dev with little money, and made a profitable business out of it?

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

#53

Post by nanis »

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…

Indeed, for a bunch of hobby things, I use

   rsync -rvzC --no-p --no-g --chmod=ugo=rwX --stats -e "ssh . ${remote}:${path}"
where `${remote}` is defined in `.ssh/config` and `${path}` is in the project config to move files over to a new deployment directory. Then, a quick command over SSH changes the symlink to the site's configuration file and restarts the web server.

The sites are either on Linode or SSDNodes. Has been working for me for decades and don't need to change it for these hobby things. After all, the log files prove that these things get more traffic from exploitation probes than real people ;-)

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

#54

Post by leetrout »

davedx wrote: post #34
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), run…

This is the way

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

#55

Post by dsgrillo »

I have currently 2 projects with some traffic (5k req/day) running in production.

Both have a similar setup:

   - 1 droplet with docker pre-installed from DigitalOcean
   - clone directly the repo from github
   - together with the code, I have a folder with a bunch of docker images (caddy, mysql, php, redis, etc.) that I can easily spin up.
   - for any release, I manually ssh, git pull and run the migrations (if any) and manually rebuild any docker image if needed
   - I have daily jobs that dumps and zip the entire DB to S3
   - if I have some deployment that I know will break any functionality during deployment, I warn the users before and accept that downtime.
   - never had to handle a "hard" rollback till now.
I've planned to change this setup for while, but until now, didn't find any reason that justifies the effort.

I spend 20$ (10$ per droplet) + few cents on S3 per month with them.

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

#56

Post by adventured »

I've been a solo Web/Internet entrepreneur for most of 20+ years, non-stop.

The DevOps side of things is trivial in the beginning and takes very little time compared to actual development.

Ubuntu server, Nginx, Mysql or Postgres, PHP, Go, Redis. Configured reasonably, it's a ridiculously reliable stack where things very rarely go wrong.

I prefer DigitalOcean these days. Takes And that's it. Back-ups on eg a database focused droplet are automated by DigitalOcean. Occasionally I have specialized back-up needs, and I'll do a bit of custom work for that. Most of this could be offloaded by using DigitalOcean's database service, I just prefer to limit cost by not.

Under no circumstances would I use Kubernetes for a smaller to medium size service.

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

#57

Post by TekMol »

I scaled to millions of users as a solo founder and still run the whole show myself. AMA if you like.

Here is what works for me:

CI: From the terminal, I run my tests and commit to git.

Deployments: rsync

Rollbacks: Never did one. If something breaks, I fix it and rsync the fix to production.

DB: MariaDB

k8s: I don't use it. Computers are very fast these days. A cheap single VPS will get you a long way.

Nightmare: Not really. I spend about 30 minutes per week on DevOps.

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

#58

Post by CodinM »

I'm using Hetzner, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Docker to automate the build and release of an app I'm planning on launching (..eventually). I use Terraform to provision the Hetzner VMs with Docker running on them, in there I have a container with the GitHub Runner that pulls Flutter and creates a nice build environment as well as release env (using Fastlane), then it uses the latest code, compiles, releases to Play store. Works like a charm, initially it was just a Docker container on a Pi, but the main reason I went that route was being able to move it whenever/wherever.

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

#59

Post by noduerme »

davedx wrote: post #34
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), run…

Basically same here. In cases the deployment has to be zipped and manually deployed to elastic beanstalk. On some EC2 instances for projects running a PHP stack, I don't even bother with this, just SFTP script changes to the server straight out of my IDE. Take care of any rollback needs with local Git versioning.

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

#60

Post by CodinM »

TekMol wrote: post #57

I scaled to millions of users as a solo founder and still run the whole show myself. AMA if you like. Here is what works for me: CI: From the terminal, I run my tests and commit to git. Deployments: rsync Rollbacks: Never did one. If something breaks, I fix it and rsync the fix to production. DB: MariaDB k8s: I don't use it. Computers are very fast these days. A cheap single VPS will get you a long way. Nightmare: No…

What is the domain of your venture? (assuming it's not something you want to advertise specifically)
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