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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?

#301

Post by Fiahil »

caffeine wrote: post #300
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…

Hey, this is pretty cool (I am doing the oldhat stuff, so interesting to hear about something different) >> Job scheduling is built-in (and -fuck- logs are much more accessible on a failed job container than in a custom cron + sh solution) Can you expand on this? How do you handle logs?

I don't handle anything, I just output to stdout and I can access any directly from its container. Job or Pod, it's the same. If I had a larger log volume, I would have some kind of log aggregator to send them to ES or cloud provider monitoring stack

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

#302

Post by beagle3 »

lbayes wrote: post #225
djakaitis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

How do you backup the SQLite?

I used to rsync them, but when traffic picked up, I started to fear an inconsistent copy (rsync does verify at the end there are no new changes, and restarts - but i don’t know the exact strategy so I am wear if relying on it).

I switched to doing .backup and rsync that instead - but am considering switching to litestream instead.

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

#303

Post by jtsiskin »

crummy wrote: post #247
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…

Fly.io is a pretty nice alternative too.

ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR when trying to connect

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

#305

Post by aristofun »

soneca wrote: post #14

I only have side-projects, very different from a full-time, revenue earning solo-preneur, but I only use serverless. My preferred stack now is NextJS, hosted on Vercel with FaunaDB. The main reason is to “outsource” devops to them. I am not sure how it would work on a larger scale, but for my use is perfect.

How much money do you spend on this?

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

#306

Post by davidbanham »

I run three different saas products as a solo. Here’s some things I’ve picked up:

Some things can be simpler when there’s only one of you. Take those opportunities when they arise.

You don’t need remote CI when there’s only one dev. Just make running the test suite part of your deploy script.

Use hosted services. Sure it would be cheaper to rent a server from OVH and do it all yourself. You don’t have time for that. You’re saving money on staff, spend a little on a hosted database, k8s, etc.

I love Google Cloud Run. Love it. Seamless deploys, dead easy rollbacks, inbuilt secret management, etc.

Micro services are about scaling teams, not technology. You’re a team of one, that’s probably the number of services you should have.

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

#307

Post by jitendrac »

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…

Would you like to share the vps configuration and traffic you handle per month without diving deep into your venture?

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

#308

Post by diiq »

sumtechguy wrote: post #239
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.…

Probably the best tool you have is somewhere to write your notes down. What you did, why you did it, how to reproduce it. That saves you time in a year or two when you go 'hmm I did something like this before have to do it again because some CPU ate itself'. My old notes have saved me a lot of re-work over the years. Because I had written down what I did so I do not have to rebuild it. I can just skip along the notes…

Absolutely, extensive notes are a huge part of my practice both on teams and solo [1] -- I'm trying to say "solve the problems you actually have" not "when solo, cowboy-code everything like a madman".

[1] https://sambleckley.com/writing/lab-notebooks.html

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

#309

Post by ignas- »

mleonhard wrote: post #294
ignas- wrote: post #21

This seems to (strangely) be an unpopular answer here, but I've spent a weekend to terraform everything. I run a couple of different projects which are yet to pick-up traction, so prototyping quickly is essential. What I have now is terraform on Github which handles Networking (VPC, subnets), ECS/ECR, ALB for my backend and S3/CloudFront for frontend. Everything is on AWS because I'm familiar with it, so it's faster.…

I spent a lot of time on Terraform + Packer code to set up VPC, RDS, Route53, AWS Cert Manager, ELB, EC2, my API server, S3, CloudFront, and CloudWatch. The setup had a lot of complexity and footguns. Plus there was the risk of accidentally running up a huge AWS bill. Later, I realized that Heroku + Netlify are good enough. Switching was easy. The hardest part was admitting to myself that I had wasted so much time on…

AWS bill is a concern. I put alerts on billing but they do come with a delay.

I was thinking Digital Ocean. Or Heroku for the current project, but ended up with a design with quite a few serverless pieces using lambda. Which has a great free tier and is very useful for my use-case.

Would not say that AWS is too much complexity though.. When you go over things at least once and understand how thing fall together

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

#310

Post by geerlingguy »

lenova wrote: post #163
brightball wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything by geerlingguy on Ansible Galaxy.

> Anything by geerlingguy on Ansible Galaxy. I've been writing some Ansible playbooks recently for the first time in years, and came upon geerlingguy's work. That guy is a powerhouse when it comes to writing Ansible roles/modules!

Why, thanks ;)
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