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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?

#211

Post by throwaway2016a »

dsgrillo wrote: post #154
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.

Good question and I have an answer for you. It depends on your risk tolerance and resiliency.

If you compare it to a single machine with multiple tenants and no replication, it doesn't make sense. But that comes with risks and given the OPs question in the context of a k8s cluster (which for HA is a minimum of 5 servers), I figured they are prioritizing time savings over money.

Losing customer data, downtime, and data breaches can kill some companies before they even take off.

If your particular business is not sensitive to that than you can run your own database. Or better yet, if you're a content business you may not even need a database at all.

But even so, if you run your own DB you need to worry about backups and such so it may even still be worth the money. And if you are going for High Availability (HA), running a properly replicated cluster can be time consuming.

The cost of a t3.medium RDS instance on AWS for instance is $0.068 / hour compared to a t3.medium instance on EC2 is $0.0416 per hour. That is an extra $19 per month. For my use case, paying an extra $19 a month is well worth the savings in time and the piece of mind I have knowing my backups are running and if the server crashes I can recover quickly. But you must consider use cases and your's might be different.

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

#212

Post by maxk42 »

Scaled multiple self-hosted products up to tens of millions of hits / month. Scaled several for clients up as far as the hundreds of billions of hits per month. (Yes, hundreds of billions.) Never seen a kubernetes deployment that was (A) necessary or (B) simpler than some alternative.

Unless you're doing something very slow / processor-intensive, you'll probably never even need an autoscaler before you can afford to hire an expert to do it for you. You'd be surprised how far you can get with a small VM running your whole stack.

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

#213

Post by jon-wood »

strzibny wrote: post #167
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…

Until Heroku has a huge downtime (like recently) and you are f*ked. If you have your own VMs, you can quickly move them to a different provider, but it's hard to start figuring out servers when Heroku is down and your business stopped. That said, I would also recommend Heroku to many.

I can almost guarantee that over a period of years you'll see significantly less downtime that can be attributed to Heroku than you would on VMs that you manage. Even if that isn't the case, if Heroku are responsible for it then you can mostly just kick back and let them fix it, rather than spending 24 hours without sleep migrating VMs between providers.

The context here is also that of a single entrepreneur building a business. At that point in the lifecycle of a product downtime really isn't that big of a deal, customers tend to be pretty understanding so long as you recover.

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

#214

Post by orky56 »

tommiegannert wrote: post #193
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…

Agreed on rollbacks. I think rollbacks are a thing when you don't know the code, or you're too busy to be able to debug. Like when being on-call for a large codebase. If you're solo, you probably know enough that fix-forward is the way to go. (This assumes the system isn't critical enough that it needs fixing even if you're asleep, but then you would probably not be solo anyway.)

Not sure if it's a philosophical question but as a solopreneur I have always rolled back since it keeps my commit chain cleaner rather than have previous versions that were buggy. I want to minimize downtime and a rollback is always faster than a fix-forward even when you know, or think you know, the fix.

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

#216

Post by OJFord »

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…

Why pull, as opposed to push(ing to the server as remote)?

Then you could have any necessary restart or migration or whatever run in a post-receive hook.

I realise that's starting to get back in to tooling and config etc., but it's not that complex, and if you're already using git anyway...

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

#217

Post by orky56 »

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…

Totally agree. There's some impostor syndrome in play here. If you don't need the scale, why waste your time managing a more complex setup? Heroku might be slightly more expensive in the short term but your time is better spent building/selling than future-proofing or just doing it because larger operations have to.

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

#218

Post by domk »

Don't.

Use a PaaS like Heroku, hook it up to your GitHub and a CI platform. Get your database hosted on Heroku or somewhere similar - plenty exists for anything you might need (Postgres, MySQL, Redis, Mongo...).

Don't do things that increase your operational overhead like using microservices or running unusual databases for which a good hosted solution doesn't exist. Stay away from anything k8s.

It will be a bit more expensive but well worth the extra money, compared to the time you'd spend on operations.

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

#219

Post by barelysapient »

Keep it stupid simple.

Use tech that you understand and minimize the layers of complexity between deploying, starting and troubleshooting an instance.

For me, I like digital ocean droplet(s). Stupid simple IAM. SSH scripts for CI deployments. Everything sits behind a Cloudflare cache.

The backend sends key events like restarts and fatal errors into a dedicated Slack channel. Its my confirmation a deployment worked and first alert if something crashed.

My business partner and I are currently running a $1m/arr business with this setup on a single digital ocean instance, Python3 and Nuxtjs.

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

#220

Post by count »

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.…

'knowledge silos' in a one person team are real: Me today and me from 2 years ago when I set a thing up are different people, and I don't remember that any more than a team mate in a multi-person team would know it. This is where 'professional' approaches can help considerably: using 'standardized' stuff, instead of bespoking everything (even if bespoking is much easier), or making sure you write a TON of documentation for anything you don't do daily...
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