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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?

#201

Post by spfzero »

mrweasel wrote: post #168
dsgrillo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have any migration, you probably want to rollback them as well

That's sort of pet peeve of mine: Migration are done separate from code deploys. Version 1 of your code runs on schema version 1. Schema version 2 does not make chances that will break code version 1. Code version 2 can utilize the chances made in schema version 2, but you're still able to rollback the code. Each schema migration should also come with its own rollback script. The downside is that you might need three…

Agree with this and have practiced and advocated for it. Make the schema changes to support the new feature first, then verify existing software still works. Deploy the schema change. Then develop the new feature, test, and deploy the program. That way you can deploy and rollback without needing to synchronously run a bunch of migration routines.

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

#202

Post by balabaster »

It depends very much what your tech stack looks like, but I use Git, CircleCI and Octopus Deploy to Azure for my stack. It's cheap in terms of maintenance and because I know them all like the back of my hand it's quick and easy for me to set up.

As for rollback, I don't really use rollback. I have a roll-forward strategy. My DB deployments are migrations and so long as there's no data-loss caused by a migration (my migrations are always backwards compatible with the previous version) there's no need to roll back. Azure brings point-in-time restore which can be triggered if necessary.

I think the key is like with anything. There's a learning curve on your toolset. Once you've overcome that hurdle and you know to set up automation for everything from the outset. You build your pipeline shell. You never do anything manually. If you need infrastructure of any form, it's always code-first, included in source control and done the right way. Never do anything manually and rely on your automation to carry you. It seems labour intensive up front, but once you're there, it's sustainable.

It takes discipline not to cut corners. The minute you start to cut corners and get lazy is the path leading to your doom.

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

#203

Post by clairity »

dbbk wrote: post #110
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…

Or just deploy it on Heroku and call it a day?

yah, this (or something similar) is the most straightforward solution. the whole point of heroku is to abstract away devops for solo/small dev groups and make deployments “one-click”. it’s unclear why that option was explicitly ruled out here.

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

#204

Post by aristofun »

decidertm wrote: post #155

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 h…

From the first glance it's not clear how is it different from heroku and what exact pain points are you trying to solve

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

#205

Post by christophilus »

I lead a team of 3. We use render.com and have a handful of bare metal servers for CPU-intensive background jobs. The bare metal servers are auto-patched Ubuntu servers. It’s pretty much 0 maintenance. The server setup is automated via a single provisioning bash script. Render.com is quite nice, if a bit limited in its options vs Heroku. Highly recommended.

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

#206

Post by RapperWhoMadeIt »

I have this friend who recently founded a start-up with two other guys. But he basically is the only one doing any DevOps, so we could say he is a one-man show regarding the technology side of things. Two weeks ago we talked about how he is developing his product and he told me he will go full FaaS as much as possible, because it lets him forget about the whole Ops side of things and focus in real product development (what will ultimately bring revenue to the company). I am a big fan of playing as much sysadmin as possible for my own developments, and I like the CI/CD mentality associated with microservices and containers. All I am saying is that that conversation with that guy really opened my eyes to the fact that maybe in some scenarios (specially at the birth of a company) going full serverless might improve the time to market of your product. I am in no way saying that serverless also has a ton of disadvantages, e. g. vendor lock in.

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

#207

Post by oneplane »

"It depends"...

For simple monoliths it's a non-CI method plus scp, for infrastructure-only it's SaltStack and Terraform. For something where the DevOps part is the deliverable, it can go wild pretty fast: GitLab CI with various CI steps (static analysis, building, unit tests, integration tests, browser tests, blob storage of the result), then CD steps depend on what it is that was built; docker images just get pushed to a registry and another async job listens for pushes and does the deploy in Fargate or Kubernetes. For some jobs with larger needs you get into ArgoCD and Kubernetes resource deployments that way.

Essentially it depends on the zoom level:

Zoomed in to the max: just a build.sh or makefile, optionally called by a CI or IDE of your choice so the building is exactly the same no matter what invoked it.

Zoomed out a little: the results of the build need to end up somewhere, sometimes a step in between like a package registry, docker image registry etc.

Zoomed out to level 3: once the deployment gets actually done, the runtime itself is responsible for checking for database migrations, locks, maintenance mode, so that has to be part of the startup. If it's a multi-instance workload it depends on database migrations if there has to be downtime.

Zoomed out to level 4: if it also needs to deploy 'other things', like rules and records to Cloudflare, resources in AWS, resources in K8S and even update some stuff in buckets or DynamoDB, that requires some orchestration and DSL like Terraform, SaltStack, Ansible and application-specific CD like ArgoCD or Flux or even just the aws cli tools to trigger a refresh.

Customer decides how much money they want to spend and that scopes what zoom level they get. Usually depends on how many developers or ops people they have themselves and how involved they want to be and what continuity or guarantees they are looking for. The only thing that is not optional is that everything has to be in Git. If a customer doesn't want that, they cannot be my customer. I'm done living in the 90's.

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

#208

Post by bingohbangoh »

fulafel wrote: post #189
bingohbangoh wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroku is by far the best for this but just to throw in some alternatives: * Digital Ocean Apps -- somewhat finicky but works very similar to Heroku, it gets closer to bare metal so I prefer it * render.com * AWS Elastic Beanstalk -- though setting this up is non-trivial, it is very similar to Heroku with its "set it and forget it" * AWS Container Services -- if you're using Docker * Google App Engine * Supabase -- g…

Also AWS Copilot if you like CLI based tooling, similar to Elastic Beanstalk but easier (at least if you're comfortable making a Dockerfile)

Was not aware of Copilot! Looks much better than Elastic Beanstalk
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