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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?

#61

Post by Aulig »

I'm a noob when it comes to devops, so you might not want to do it my way.

I keep it super simple. I have a git repo where I directly commit into master. When I want to take the changes live I ssh onto my VPS, I git pull the changes and restart the website service.

I use an SQLite DB that I automatically copy (backup) to my local machine daily via the Windows equivalent of a cron job. Once it's on my local machine it's also backed up to other places as part of my local backup process.

I run my tests manually when I think I've made significant changes.

Otherwise I just react to errors ASAP (I get an email notification from sentry when a new error occurs)

A lot of this doesnt work with a bigger team of course.

It's a balance between risk and time investment. The simpler your dev ops stuff, the higher your risk of introducing bugs into production. But it saves you a lot of time not dealing with that stuff.

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

#62

Post by brightball »

You avoid it as much as possible. When your time is that valuable, lean on PaaS options like Heroku, Fly.io, Gigalixir, etc.

If it’s just you, you can afford to use a simple shell script to run tests locally before deploying or use a Travis/Circle/Cloudbees CI option too.

You have enough to focus on with the application itself.

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

#63

Post by p0nce »

I have no DB, static website, deploying in production on a VPS with git (manually) and rsync + Cloudflare. I just don't know what kubernetes is, nor do I encounter any of the problems you mention.

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

ok.

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

#64

Post by eatonphil »

I'm building an open-core data IDE that runs as a desktop application or server. Since it's open source, all tests run on Github Actions for free. This includes basic e2e testing using Selenium on Windows, macOS, and Linux (e.g. [0]); and unit/integration tests.

If it were a private repo I'd still shell out for Github Actions or Circle CI most likely. I'd also consider buying a chunky-enough minipc for ~$500 and an older mac mini and set up runners on them.

For the moment private runners isn't a problem. But soon I'll need to start integration-testing proprietary code paths like querying Oracle or MS SQL Server. In that case I probably need to set up a dedicated box with all the right licenses so I can run CI jobs on it.

[0] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation/blob/master/.g...

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

#65

Post by TekMol »

CodinM wrote: post #60
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)

I like to keep it off my HN profile. I feel I am more open to share details this way.

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

#66

Post by NortySpock »

nanis wrote: post #53
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 be…

Also a hobbyist sysadmin at home, but after reading a few comments on the internet, I found that the rsync -z compress flag was bottlenecked on a maxed-out CPU thread of my Raspberry Pi 4 NAS transfers.

Admittedly, these are mostly "local" drive-to-drive transfers over USB rather than server-to-server transfers over house-wide gigabit. But consider trying the transfer without compression.

I'll definitely have to read up on your other flags though, if your rsync works from just one machine rather than both that might solve a minor problem case I have where the destination machine lacks rsync...

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/188737/does-compres...

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

#67

Post by bootwoot »

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 great. Until you need to roll back.

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

#68

Post by gwbas1c »

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…

I really like Heroku, when I work on NodeJS projects.

BUT: In the last year I've had some rather serious downtime issues that were 100% Heroku's fault. (Poor encapsulation of Postgres configuration via the connection string, and they mistakenly claimed that I violated their TOS when I didn't. They apologized and fixed the situation.)

I'd really like to see some good alternatives to Heroku. Not just because of their screwups, but because the languages that I want to work on have limited support in Heroku.

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

#69

Post by brightball »

bootwoot wrote: post #67
davedx wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 great. Until you need to roll back.

Keep a simple tool like Ansible around for those spooky admin tricks and you can take advantage of the Ansistrano plugins for smooth deploy and rollback (Ruby's great Capistrano tool ported to Ansible).

https://ansistrano.com/

It's pretty fantastic.

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

#70

Post by thujlife »

bootwoot wrote: post #67
davedx wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 great. Until you need to roll back.

rollback.sh
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