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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?

#151

Post by Fiahil »

Because everyone here is hell bent on "spooky arcane oldhat sysadmin deploy techniques", I'll share my setup using k8s.

- CI on github actions

- Project management on post-its (short) and READMEs (long term)

- deployment is done by a github action trigger on the `main` branch

- Hosting is using AKS, GKE, or on-prem k3s on a raspberry pi. Want to restart a service ? just kill the pods.

- Devops took about 2 days of work initially and now shared by every project for less than 30 minutes by project.

- Deloying a test cluster (or a test k3s node) is reproducible on whatever hardware / cloud provider you get, sometimes I often create a full-blown dummy cluster for running test scenario

- Certificate renewal is automatic (cert-manager)

- DNS record creation to services/ingress is automatic (ExternalDNS)

- Authentication using OAuth/OIDC is also set up automatically on whatever identity provider you have

- Database backup is automatic

- Load Balancing is built-in

- Job scheduling is built-in (and -fuck- logs are much more accessible on a failed job container than in a custom cron + sh solution)

- Service discovery is not needed

- Monitoring and alerting is not, but cloud providers often have something for you

Note: this is highly effective because I already had significant K8s experience, so, if you're still learning about what Ingress-Controller to choose for your OIDC proxy, then don't go that route.

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

#152

Post by piettes »

I might be biased here, as I started as a side project and wanted to learn k8s in the process. It turned out quite funny to set up and I am happy with the result, except for the struggle I had to add SSL. I have 1 frontend, 4 micro-services and 2 postgres. One cluster for test, one for production.

I use Gitlab for CI, commits to master create a new docker image in the Gitlab registry. I manually trigger deployment on k8s with `kubectl rollout restart XXX`

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

#153

Post by darkr »

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…

+1. For pre-A series/pre-revenue/pre-1k paying customers and other early stage businesses you can do a lot worse than starting out on Heroku, especially if you don't have sysadmin/cloud/devops expertise (and even if you do, that time could/should be spent on much more important things at this stage).

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

#154

Post by dsgrillo »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #121

Don't: - Manage your own DBs for production. I used to manage my own but now I use IaaS for it. It's worth the extra cost even if your budget is low since it lowers your risk and lets you move faster. AWS Aurora is awesome but expensive. There's a SaaS/IaaS out there for most DBs. And they handle the backups! - Use Kubernetes. k8s is awesome, I love it, but it is a beast and probably overkill for your solo ops team t…

> Don't: manage your own DBs for production. [...]

Why, though?

If you're really on a low budget, the extra $$ for a managed DB doesn't really pay for itself. I'd rather prefer spinning up a container running whatever DB I need and run daily backups to an external vendor.

In my case, the website is free, living on ads revenue, so every penny counts.

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

#155

Post by decidertm »

I'm a technical co-founder at Northflank https://northflank.com. A platform to deploy microservices, cron jobs and stateful databases from development to production.

I started working on Northflank to make it more simple for developers either solo or in a team to manage and automate DevOps complexity away.

We support CI for GitHub, Bitbucket & Gitlab (SaaS and self-hosted) with either Dockerfiles or Buildpacks. We have a robust and feature rich platform via UI, API and CLI. Out of the box you get end-to-end DevOps: CI/CD/CD, Horizontal and vertical scaling, persistent workloads with managed (MongoDB, Redis, Postgres, MySQL, Minio), backups, restores, real-time observability and metrics, DNS, TLS, mTLS, Teams & RBAC and more…

Let me know what you think of our offering + site!

Platform: https://northflank.com

Application Documentation: https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/overview

API Documentation: https://northflank.com/docs/v1/api/introduction

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

#156

Post by c0nrad »

(Profitable Solo founder)

Thankfully lots of tools do most of the heavy lifting. I use k8s, GKE does most of the work for me. It's very nice to have autoscaling for traffic spikes. Same with database (MongoDB Altas), dead simple autoscaling. I would never run my own k8s nor database.

I wrote more details about some of the Ops stuff I do here in a previous similar question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26204402

Coincidentally I also wrote some architecture notes about a new product last night: https://blog.c0nrad.io/posts/slack-latex/

I think everyone's milage will very, but as general principles, staging is nice, reading docs saves time overall, tests help you sleep at night and make it easier to make changes 6 months in the future, simple health checks (or anything on a critical path) help you catch the real issues that need immediate attention.

Good luck!

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

#157

Post by techn00 »

Fiahil wrote: post #151

Because everyone here is hell bent on "spooky arcane oldhat sysadmin deploy techniques", I'll share my setup using k8s. - CI on github actions - Project management on post-its (short) and READMEs (long term) - deployment is done by a github action trigger on the `main` branch - Hosting is using AKS, GKE, or on-prem k3s on a raspberry pi. Want to restart a service ? just kill the pods. - Devops took about 2 days of wo…

How did you set up the DNS part?

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

#158

Post by lambdaba »

TekMol wrote: post #65
CodinM wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you mind putting in some contact details (even temporarily) on your profile? I'd like to have a chat with you some time, I was looking through this whole thread for a comment like yours and I resonated a lot with you. (my details are in my profile)

Not immediately, but in the following weeks.

Thanks again for sharing.

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

#159

Post by dsgrillo »

diiq wrote: post #114
tarunm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My experience says to backup to a different vendor.

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

#160

Post by leros »

I could run things myself on k8s or other self-managed systems but I have better things to spend my time on and it's not my expertise.

I host my apps and databases in Heroku. Yes it's more expensive than alternatives, but it's easy and I trust their database backups.

For everything else, I find managed services.

Basically, I'm a developer and I let other companies handle most of my DevOps for me.

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