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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?

#111

Post by Grimm665 »

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…

If you like this style of deployment, and you haven't looked into Ansible yet, give it a try, you may enjoy it. I had similar build processes before using Ansible and I have found it a really positive step up.

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

#114

Post by diiq »

tarunm wrote: post #92
diiq wrote: post #22

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.…

> I pay a service to manage backups so I can walk away from a solo project for months and know it's ticking away. Any recommendation of such service?

Pretty much anyone you can pay to host a database, you can pay to back it up. Amazon rds, heroku postgres, google cloud sql... pick the service that works for you, and they have some affordance for backups. Backups are something I expect, rather than something I shop around for.

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

#115

Post by marstall »

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…

I'm fully on team spooky admin - however on my latest project, I've been loving being on the free tier of tools like vercel, which deploys from git commit, and firebase, which is mostly maintenance free. That really reduces the amount of devops in my day.

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

#117

Post by sbayeta »

codazoda wrote: post #107
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…

My favorite deploy is using a simple `git pull` instead of scp. I also avoid complex build tools when I can. You either need your built files in the repo or you need to avoid them. Either are fine for my small personal projects. The only real exception I make is keeping any necessary secrets out of my repo. Those get dropped on the server manually. This also solves the roll-back problem mentioned elsewhere. Just chec…

I do the same thing (just a couple os customers, o en Linode per customer). Hopefully I'll need something more complex eventually.

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

#118

Post by nanis »

NortySpock wrote: post #66
nanis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Really good observation. All the settings are from a long time ago when link quality was way worse than what we get these days.

I should review those options, definitely.

> -C, --cvs-exclude auto-ignore files in the same way CVS does

Just goes to show you how long I've been using this stuff :-)

The additional options may not be relevant now that I am just deploying creating a new target directory each time.

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

#120

Post by iKevinShah »

scottydelta wrote: post #95
iKevinShah wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 backu…

> Did you have any instance where you needed to restore the DB / Have you done restoration tests to ensure this is a feasible solution? Whenever a build is deployed to stage server, it automatically pulls the latest version backup in last 1 hour and restores it on the stage for testing with the latest data. I have config to do the same restore to the prod if needed. I have been using the same setup for over 2 years t…

scottydelta, Thank you for taking the time to give me more context / insight.

Safe to say you have a verified way of backup and restore (with worst case data loss of an 1 hour).

I am not exactly an expert on what stage does Transaction ID Wraparound comes in but still know that as one of the key criticisms of PostgreSQL so wanted to check.

Also, 7 days backup with versioning switched is a smart tactic! Thanks once again for this.

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