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Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup

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Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup

#21

Post by Closi »

hatware wrote: post #15

I live in the United States, and it's kind of shocking to see such privileged responses to what is ultimately a useful starting stack. Imagine a young engineer in Bogota, or Ukraine if you want to get topical. They may barely have the hardware to accomplish anything compute wise... and your answer is "Use AWS!" Access to the cloud is privilege to the highest degree. You used to need academic credentials to use someon…

OP also lives in the United States, so I’m not entirely sure where this idea that it was targeted at startups in the developing world comes from - its certainly not listed on the page.

Also Ukraine is very advanced in terms of dev and IT, and developers and entrepreneurs still need to maximise their productivity, so I’m not sure your idea that the technology stacks of Ukrainian startups should look different because their time is less valuable is valid.

Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup

#22

Post by _puk »

swipee wrote: post #7
dolni wrote: post #2

This looks cool as a learning experience and all, but... Self-hosting all your own stuff has to be the worst thing you can do as a new startup. You need to be focused on impactful work, not dealing with critical security updates to your Mattermost install. And definitely not worrying about figuring out how to properly HA databases and your self-hosted S3. Just use managed services.

So what should you focus on? What OSI layer is a good starting point? It depends on your skills right? I agree you should use as much established products as possible but you build your stack and create that unique differentiation on the market by also learning technology as you go. It all depends on where you land with your idea to the market. If you are selling knit figures online - you are right that you should no…

Pretty much every element in your stack should be the result of a build or buy decision initially.

If something doesn't directly contribute to your competitive edge then run with a managed service / something off the shelf until you know enough about the domain to be able to make an informed decision about the trade offs.

Too often I've seen early teams that have spent months building out (and maintaining!) an area of the stack that could have been had off the shelf - freeing up engineering time and allowing focus on the areas that allow for true differentiation in the product.

Obviously off the shelf isn't free in financial or engineering time (though you can sure get a lot of free credits / on free tiers nowadays), but if your main product is doing something fancy on top of the output of a fairly generic process, do yourself a favour and find a company that has a product specialising in that process, don't build it from scratch until you have your product market fit.

Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup

#23

Post by rglullis »

frizzy wrote: post #11
dolni wrote: post #2

This looks cool as a learning experience and all, but... Self-hosting all your own stuff has to be the worst thing you can do as a new startup. You need to be focused on impactful work, not dealing with critical security updates to your Mattermost install. And definitely not worrying about figuring out how to properly HA databases and your self-hosted S3. Just use managed services.

Hey, autor here) I agree with you: when you only start, you should pay 100% attention to custdev and use as much ready to go cloud services as you can. Thats why I included "Free for Dev" link. However, I think that when you started development, especially with a team up to 10 people, or if you work with private information - you should hosting some of services and databases yourself. In my experience, at least priva…

Have you considered turning this into a SaaS of your own? As in: here is the code if you want to self-Host, but if you want I can manage it for you for X/month?

Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup

#25

Post by jjslocum3 »

Overall, I think this idea is a great one, though the stack still needs some development/improvement. To second hatware's challenge, if you can come up with a (mostly) turn-key solution, one that would be as cheap & time-thrifty as hosting on cloud service starter tiers, you could own this segment and lure the new startup demo away from the cloud providers.

Many people seem to forget that there are no free lunches... anyone who has ever wrestled with the learning curve of a necessarily proprietary no-code solution knows that you don't usually save time or money by outsourcing your platform, and that by outsourcing, you can easily become indentured to a restrictive black-box environment you don't control.

If you're not dealing with critical security updates to your Mattermost install, you will be dealing with something equally time-consuming and fundamental, like managing CloudFormation templates or trying to get divs to nest correctly in a WebFlow one-pager.

If your startup doesn't have the in-house knowledge/intelligence to be able to run a stack like the OP's, you might ask yourself how you plan to create a successful software company without any in-house software competency.

Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup

#26

Post by paxys »

From the second line in the README:

> Warning: This setup doesn't provide high level of security or any high availability. You have to hire some skilled devops engineer (like me)) for close this gap after getting first round or sales.

And this is exactly why managed SaaS is popular. Pulling a repo of a popular open source project and deploying it to your server seems trivial, and you wonder why there are idiots out there paying through their nose for subscriptions. Then you realize your service has to be up 100% of the time, has to scale to more than a handful of users, you have to perform regular backups (and ensure they actually work), all user access has to be audited, you have to offer IT support to all your employees. Very soon your full time job at the company isn't building products for customers but managing an internal chat server. And then the couple hundred bucks a month other companies pay to Slack and Google start to make sense.

Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup

#27

Post by qwerki »

axg11 wrote: post #6

If anyone hacking away or at the very earliest stages of a startup is reading this - run away. I'm sure this was a great learning process for the creator. However, as a new startup you should be aiming to take as many shortcuts as possible. Use every hosted or managed service that makes sense for you. Use anything that saves you time. Your job as the "technologist" is to deliver value (in the form of software) in the…

Not disagreeing but this assumes Silicon Valley budgets for startups. The story may be different if you're not funded yet and in discovery mode or if you're bootstrapping.

Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup

#28

Post by sanjayio »

paxys wrote: post #26

From the second line in the README: > Warning: This setup doesn't provide high level of security or any high availability. You have to hire some skilled devops engineer (like me)) for close this gap after getting first round or sales. And this is exactly why managed SaaS is popular. Pulling a repo of a popular open source project and deploying it to your server seems trivial, and you wonder why there are idiots out t…

Second this, having the peace of mind that my task manager, among other things, are backed up and someone else's problem is priceless. I think having a list of saas's that are startup friendly would be nice. For example, free for up to 3 members. That way when the start up wins the saas wins as well. Anyone know if a list like that exists?

Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup

#29

Post by onion2k »

This setup doesn't provide high level of security or any high availability.

After actually making your product these are probably the two most important factors for most SaaS startups. If you screw up availability you can't get customers - your site will fall over every time you push any marketing. If you screw up security you can't keep customers - you'll fail any kind of due diligence or you'll burn your reputation. Using third party services that do the hard parts for you is very, very sensible.

There's nothing wrong with a boilerplate starter kit if you understand the hard parts and just want to go faster. There's nothing wrong with using starter kit for a prototype. But if you actually want to build your app, and you think you need this, you should lean towards using something that manages this sort of thing for you instead.

Re: Selfhosted tech starter pack for development of new project or startup

#30

Post by frizzy »

the_common_man wrote: post #24

Very nice. How is your experience with docker swarm?

Defacto docker swarm lose race with k8s and one time almost die, and it has much less features than k8s (or even hashicorp nomad)... But in other hand, personally I don't like k8s because of it complexity, and I really don't like when it used for running only few microservices on 3 hosts xD So my opinion: if you don't have resources to learn k8s and you don't run 100 apps with autoscaling - you can adopt docker swarm. Otherwise, you have to buy k8s from you cloud provider and learn it =\ In case of selfhosted k8s I recommend deckhouse.io or rancher.com

Even more important thing, than chose your docker orchestrator, - this is chose of distributed file system that you need for running stateful apps: I strongly recommend you buy efs or ceph from cloud provider, otherwise you should test next products yourself in your setup: https://vitobotta.com/2019/08/06/kubernetes-storage-openebs-...

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