I'd like to here more on your usage of SSLMate and SOPs.
For SSLMate I hardly understand what problem it solves (even if we forget about having Let's Encrypt free certs).
For SOPs - how it's integrated in your flow.
Thanks in advance.
What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
81–90 of 180 posts
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#82Sveiki! @cuu508 how do you think opensourcing selfhosted version of your product impacted your sales? Positively, negatively?
I can't say definitely, but my gut feeling is positively.
A. What if another operator takes the source code, and starts a competing commercial service?
I've seen very few (I think 1 or 2) instances of somebody attempting a commercial product based on Healthchecks open-source code. I think that's because it's just a lot of work to run the service professionally, and then even more work to find users and get people to pay for it.
B. What if a potential customer decides to self-host instead?
I do see a good amount of enthusiasts and companies self-hosting their private Healthchecks instance. I'm fine with that. For one thing, the self-hosting users are all potential future clients of the hosted service. They are already familiar and happy with the product, I just need to sell the "as a service" part.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the decision not to use Patroni for HA Postgres in this case, so that you don’t add more complexity?
Yes. Plus, from reading database outage postmortems, I was not comfortable making the "do we failover now?" decision automatic. Think about the brownouts, where the primary is still up, but slow. Or it experiences intermittent packet loss. I've automated the mechanics of the failover, but it still must be initiated manually.
That‘s a good decision! Developers nowadays fear a failing machine so much because it‘s happening more often on the cloud than dedicated servers. I wouldn‘t use automatic failover too. Cleaning up the mess can take hours and days, a small downtime of a few minutes/hours is better.
I‘ve seen one developer using telegram for ha-failover which is great! Just a message and the scripts are executed for a failover. You can do it in seconds without even being on a computer.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#84I'm someone who likes configuring & running my own servers, it is always a pleasure reading how others small / solo businesses are running their show. It is so cool to see one-person SaaS business running on old school bare metal servers without needing any fancy devOps / containerize tooling.
From what I observe, developer prefer to stay in API abstractions than spending time on servers/other infrastructure. Partially I can understand their choice.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#85I wonder how much time do you need to spend in order to maintain such infrastructure?
With ubuntu and the automatic security updates you don‘t have to spend any time maintaining it. I haven‘t done anything in months, the system is applying security updates automatically.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the decision not to use Patroni for HA Postgres in this case, so that you don’t add more complexity?
Yes. Plus, from reading database outage postmortems, I was not comfortable making the "do we failover now?" decision automatic. Think about the brownouts, where the primary is still up, but slow. Or it experiences intermittent packet loss. I've automated the mechanics of the failover, but it still must be initiated manually.
Project I relate to, doing switch to Patroni managed DB (first of many) right today, in like a 5 hours, I may share observations from almost first hand experience later, if you care.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#87> HAProxy 2.2 for terminating TLS connections, and load balancing between app servers. Enables easy rolling updates of application servers. Wonder why he is not using hetzner's load balancer [1]. At least cost-wise, the savings are huge (4xAX41-NVME are around 160€; LB31 - the most expensive one - is 36€) [1] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/load-balancer
The load balancer is at the core of the product reliability. That seems a good reason to completely control it instead of relying on a black box.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#88I'm someone who likes configuring & running my own servers, it is always a pleasure reading how others small / solo businesses are running their show. It is so cool to see one-person SaaS business running on old school bare metal servers without needing any fancy devOps / containerize tooling.
From what I observe, developer prefer to stay in API abstractions than spending time on servers/other infrastructure. Partially I can understand their choice.
What do you mean? The economics and decision-making are different between one-person companies through small and large organizations. When you have to know to to do everything, and fix anything, it is a problem when there is complexity, and you lack control. As organizations get larger, there is more value from abstractions and more leeway for their use.
In many ways it is a luxury to be able to use said abstractions and be able to open a ticket with someone else. Of course, a single-person startup could use the same tech, but it seriously impacts their costs and they don't have time to deal with the sprawl of abstractions.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#89I'd like to here more on your usage of SSLMate and SOPs. For SSLMate I hardly understand what problem it solves (even if we forget about having Let's Encrypt free certs). For SOPs - how it's integrated in your flow. Thanks in advance.
SSLMate it is a certificate reseller with a convenient (for me) interface – a CLI program. It's no fun copy-pasting certificates from email attachments.
I'm using both RSA and ECDSA certificates (RSA for compatibility with old clients, ECDSA for efficiency). I'm not sure but looks like ECDSA is not yet generally available from Lets Encrypt.
On sops: the secrets (passwords, API keys, access tokens) are sitting in an encrypted file ("vault"). When a Fabric task needs secrets to fill in a configuration file template, it calls sops to decrypt the vault. My Yubikey starts flashing, I tap the key, Fabric task receives the secrets and can continue.
Re: What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree with the overall sentiment (fix the big problems first to maximize payoff), the issue is one of attitude. Keeping a "save where possible" mindset, no matter how large the immediate payoff (within reasonable limits) has a much greater chance of success. You have that effect in many areas of life. A quite obvious example is working out. Of course it won't make much of a difference if you skip today's work…
> Keeping a "save where possible" mindset, no matter how large the immediate payoff (within reasonable limits) has a much greater chance of success. Ironically that is what kept me from setting up solar power. Being in Scandinavia, solar has a somewhat limited potential given that days are 7 hours long during winter, and December often has less than 20 hours of sunshine in total. My calculations for the "payback" tim…
This isn't the same thing - you've actually calculated that you're unlikely to save in this situation. You made a sensible decision that the payback period is so long for your own uses that it runs the risk of not actually paying back/being beneficial. The "save where possible" mindset would be more like "I calculated it would be better, but my impact is less than my workplace doing X, so I won't".
Everyone should be calculating payback on these investments every couple of years, because the calculus changes depending on incentives/tech/other factors (e.g. EV purchases, or massive cost of living changes)