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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?

#221

Post by tootie »

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'd even go higher up the value chain with something like Vercel or Netlify if your stack fits in their offering. Heroku is a definitely a good option if you need more flexibility. The costs won't be a bottleneck until you actually have enough scale that you can afford DevOps staff.

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

#222

Post by whitepoplar »

barelysapient wrote: post #219

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 an…

100% this! Just curious--what's your business?

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

#223

Post by wefarrell »

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…

At this point CI is pretty easy to setup and monitor and it's integrated with practically every development/deployment tool, so I have to disagree about waiting to implement it.

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

#224

Post by barelysapient »

whitepoplar wrote: post #222
barelysapient wrote: post #219

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 an…

100% this! Just curious--what's your business?

We're in the hospitality sector.

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

#225

Post by lbayes »

djakaitis wrote: post #12
lbayes wrote: post #10

Ex-Googler here and 20+ year veteran of SF startups. It sounds like you have a great set of intuitions, and you're right, all that infrastructure is a nightmare to set up and manage. Step 1: Question every requirement Step 2: Drop everything that is not critical Step 3: Profit! Git hooks and Makefiles are great! I have an HP workstation I bought from eBay under my desk that has 32GB of RAM, 2x 12 core CPUs and a stat…

I hope you’re backing up customer data if you store any…

Definitely.

In fact, it's super easy to back up as it's in a SQLite database (for now).

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

#226

Post by dougbarrett »

jon-wood wrote: post #190
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…

I would advise against Elastic Beanstalk, last time I used it the product had the stink of being on life support - they've not really added any new features to it in several years, and even before that it was incredibly flakey.

What additional features are you looking for? I've been using beanstalk for the past few years, and just wrapped up doing a large deployment on it. I've never found beanstalk to be a bottleneck or not have a feature I was looking for.

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

#227

Post by PaywallBuster »

probably deploy infra manually (ec2+rds or vps at random provider)

Deployments can be automated

I usually work with PHP, so I already have playbooks to configure/install php/nginx and others

(just change few variables)

deployment only needs to add a few steps like git checkout ( easy to reuse since you're probably using the same framework across projects)

some examples here

https://github.com/MalpraveCorp/ansible

in specific

https://github.com/MalpraveCorp/ansible/blob/master/mal-be-p...

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

#228

Post by mfrye0 »

I agree with most people here. Definitely keep it simple.

With that said, I run a semi resource intensive operation, so I've invested a bit into dev ops to keep our costs down. My setup is currently on AWS, primarily using ECS, RDS, Elasticache. Infra is managed via Terraform.

I felt ECS was a nice balance vs K8s, as it's much simpler to manage, while getting the benefit of maximizing resource utilization.

For CI / deployment, I use Github Actions to build an image and push, then start a rolling refresh to update the containers to the new version. It was pretty easy to setup.

On DBs, RDS handles all the backups and maintenance. For migrations, I use https://github.com/amacneil/dbmate.

Happy to answer any other questions you have, as I've learned a lot through trial and error.

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

#229

Post by hyuuu »

tootie wrote: post #221
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'd even go higher up the value chain with something like Vercel or Netlify if your stack fits in their offering. Heroku is a definitely a good option if you need more flexibility. The costs won't be a bottleneck until you actually have enough scale that you can afford DevOps staff.

Vercel has the best dev UX in my opinion, everything just "works" the way you expected it the first time, and if not their documentation is very straight forward.

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

#230

Post by dsgrillo »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #211
dsgrillo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dat…

You bring up good points, fair enough.

I might being naive here, still:

   - losing customer data: the backup must be done frequently enough. So I'm not risking losing data.
   - downtime: I'd expect that RDS could still go south as well, maybe less frequently, but still. In my case I start another VM, run again the container and apply the backup.
   - data breaches: Of course one can misconfigure something here, but not sure how it'd be different using a managed database.
Regarding the cost, I know that there are companies spending hundreds of $$ on their infra, but it just baffles me for most use cases. I still feel that one can get really far with just a budget of 50$/month.
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