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The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

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Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#111

Post by benbristow »

treis wrote: post #61
eric_b wrote: post #14

It's cool that this stack works for the author, but if anyone is just starting out on their own one-person journey to build a product, I don't think they should follow the stack in this article. There are too many dependencies and too much complexity here. Kubernetes is overkill for 95% of applications, especially single founder SaaS businesses. Clickhouse may make sense for an analytics product but caring and feedin…

>Most people would be better off with a single beefy machine running Linux, Postgres and whatever web app framework they know The problem is back ups. You've got to figure them out yourself. And there's a decent chance that you do it wrong leading to potentially catastrophic data loss. IMHO, managed DB + S3 equivalent and then doing your own server is the sweet spot. You don't have to worry about data loss and it's s…

If you're using something like DigitalOcean, you can enable full system backups for 20% of the cost of the 'droplet' (VPS) a month in one-click. Probably quite a safe bet.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#112

Post by SmellTheGlove »

joshmn wrote: post #70
SmellTheGlove wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OOC what framework do you use? More broadly, can you help me with an opinion on my present struggle? Here goes: I have a lot of ideas, a couple of which solve problems for me and I think are even _good_ ideas. However, none have shipped because I'm spending an inordinate amount of time building out what is essentially my own SaaS template. Is it worth investing the time in doing that, or are some of the commercial Sa…

I'm a Rails guy. I've been working with it for the last 10 years and it (now) allows me to be hyper-productive. I've put other languages and frameworks into production but nothing allows me to focus like Rails does. There is a meaningful amount of boilerplate that remains for any stack if you're using it for a SaaS. It may not hurt to invest in a commercially-available solution that takes care of billing. For some pr…

That's great insight and I really appreciate you taking the time to reply. I have it in my head that I need to get to a state where I have the boilerplate "done" - able to handle accounts, users (for areas where the two need to be 1:M or vv), admin, and basic subscription billing. I'm trying to get to the point where I have this thing, and each MVP is just an incremental build on top, but instead I have this half-baked thing and a lot of undelivered ideas. I suppose there are no shortcuts and I need to hammer at it, but as you said, not go nuts with handling edge cases.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#113

Post by throwaway894345 »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #105
throwaway894345 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is a hell of a lot simpler than even getting a toy version of kubernetes up and running. Getting it off the ground is one thing, keeping things reproducible so you can stand it back up reliably if the instance goes down is another thing. You need to know what are the relevant changes that people have made to the instance over its lifetime in order to reproduce them on the new machine. Maybe this is not what people…

> And if you find that you need to scale beyond one or two instances (not everything is a CRUD webapp, after all) especially autoscaling, then... Have you ever been working a solo project that needed autoscaling? If so what was it doing that was so resource intensive per $ earned that it was still a solo project?

Picture an analytics application--something that has to crunch a bunch of data per request, and your users are mostly visiting from 9-5. Depending on the size of the user's data source, they could easily use a whole CPU and a lot of memory for each request and requests can take up to 60s or maybe even multiple minutes. You need to run more than a handful of machines, so you can either overprovision or autoscale, but in either case you need some amount of reproducibility to wrangle all of those machines and you'll probably want to plan for them to come and go because you probably don't want to pay for a bunch of high-end machines sitting idle every night. Optimization is nontrivial so you'll get around to it eventually and maybe even hire, but hiring your first employee is a lot harder than hiring your 101st employee, so you're not going to do it right now but you still need a solution to your problem...

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#114

Post by nrmitchi »

tebbers wrote: post #107
nrmitchi wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: source for this information is from discussions with DO via support and the kubernetes slack. I am not affiliated with DO in any way. The downtime issues with DOKS are directly related to the resources allocated to the control plane, which is not set up in a HA capacity. The resources assigned are directly related to the size/number of nodes you use. API-heavy applications can very easy knock out the control pl…

Thanks for the info. That doesn't sound good - one major reason for considering moving to Kubernetes was for the high availability.

Availability of your applications, and availability of the kubernetes control plane, are not typically correlated. One of the nice things about how Kubernetes orchestrates is that the master is not in the path of requests. Ie, in many situations the Kubernetes master may be unavailable, but your applications will be unaffected and can still serve traffic.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#115

Post by redisman »

eric_b wrote: post #14

It's cool that this stack works for the author, but if anyone is just starting out on their own one-person journey to build a product, I don't think they should follow the stack in this article. There are too many dependencies and too much complexity here. Kubernetes is overkill for 95% of applications, especially single founder SaaS businesses. Clickhouse may make sense for an analytics product but caring and feedin…

I believe 100% that a one-man SaaS needs to leverage their existing knowledge even more than a team. So for me it would be a no-brainer nodejs, dynamo, etc. - the tech I use every day and know in and out. You should have a very good reason to stray from your core if you actually want a business and not just a fun coding challenge.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#116

Post by deckard1 »

jturpin wrote: post #100
ramraj07 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not, assuming your database sits outside k8s there's absolutely nothing that needs to be fit inside k8s, a simple machine running docker if needed is more than sufficient. K8s is such a huge mental overhead that if it's not already naturally in your head because you've had extensive experience (or apparently born geniuses) no one with limited tech budget should ever do this.

All of these tools (Terraform, Kubernetes, Github Actions/Other CI) seem like overkill until a node dies and you need to recreate it, or configuration gets messed up and you don't remember how you deployed it in the first place. It sounds like the OP has had experience with these problems. If these aren't problems you have interest in solving, then Heroku or a similar platform would be the way to go. Running a busine…

> configuration gets messed up and you don't remember how you deployed it in the first place

Configuration getting messed up sounds more like a k8s problem than anything else. In any case, if you aren't using git and don't know how to at least back things up you really should be asking yourself if a tech company is right for you, as a one man/woman operation. There are countless other ways to make money online. Etsy, Craigslist, Shopify, etc.

> until a node dies and you need to recreate it

The way to solve both of these problems on a single node operation is to create a snapshot/clone of your machine. At that point you would really just need to worry about the IP address changing and/or updating DNS when restoring the image. The best part is you can take this "master" copy and deploy it as a staging server. Or even horizontally scale by throwing a load balancer on top. You can even get your VM exactly how you want it locally and then deploy it to DO, Linode, Vultr or whatever.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#117

Post by bitwize »

eric_b wrote: post #14

It's cool that this stack works for the author, but if anyone is just starting out on their own one-person journey to build a product, I don't think they should follow the stack in this article. There are too many dependencies and too much complexity here. Kubernetes is overkill for 95% of applications, especially single founder SaaS businesses. Clickhouse may make sense for an analytics product but caring and feedin…

When people bring up "cattle, not pets" I tell the story of my uncle, who runs a small dairy farm in Wisconsin. He has about fifty head of cattle, gave each of them names, and takes care of them when they're sick.

Point being that it takes very large scale for the principles people refer to when they say "cattle, not pets" to kick in -- even when you're actually raising cattle. But by the same token, automated reproducible configuration is a huge win whether you have 1 server or 10,000.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#118

Post by paxys »

Seeing a lot of criticism on this thread, but honestly as a founder the best stack for your company is the one you know. Whether you use Kubernetes/Terraform or manually rsync a bunch of files to a server under your desk – do whatever works for you.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#119

Post by throwaway894345 »

akiselev wrote: post #110
throwaway894345 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is a hell of a lot simpler than even getting a toy version of kubernetes up and running. Getting it off the ground is one thing, keeping things reproducible so you can stand it back up reliably if the instance goes down is another thing. You need to know what are the relevant changes that people have made to the instance over its lifetime in order to reproduce them on the new machine. Maybe this is not what people…

> Getting it off the ground is one thing, keeping things reproducible so you can stand it back up reliably if the instance goes down is another thing. Are we talking about pet servers or kubernetes here? Jokes aside, I think you're underselling how complex Kubernetes is and overselling how complex logging, monitoring, process management, et al are. You don't get any of those things with kubernetes "out of the box" un…

> Jokes aside, I think you're underselling how complex Kubernetes is and overselling how complex logging, monitoring, process management, et al are. You don't get any of those things with kubernetes "out of the box" unless you've got an ops team or someone's got a year plus experience running one cloud provider's version.

I'm pretty sure cloud providers give you logging and monitoring out of the box (as well as a bunch of other stuff) and Kubernetes itself is a process manager with its own "SSH" (kubectl exec) and so on. I'm not wed to Kubernetes either--you could use ECS/Fargate or whatever. But to do something comparable in an EC2 environment requires a fair amount of experience just to get to get the basic things that Kubernetes (or ECS) gives you out of the box. Of course, if you're well-versed in VMs already then I don't think you'll get much value out of a container solution for simple workloads, but if you're not familiar then I think container solutions are easier. But again, I might be biased by my experience.

Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS

#120

Post by segmondy »

amzans wrote: post #28
eric_b wrote: post #14

It's cool that this stack works for the author, but if anyone is just starting out on their own one-person journey to build a product, I don't think they should follow the stack in this article. There are too many dependencies and too much complexity here. Kubernetes is overkill for 95% of applications, especially single founder SaaS businesses. Clickhouse may make sense for an analytics product but caring and feedin…

I agree with you. I wouldn't blindly recommend my stack to everyone, one could argue it's probably even overkill for my SaaS project right now. At this scale I could get away with a couple of $20/mo instances, and call it a day. However, it just made sense for me due to the simplified operations, and re-using most of the learnings from my full-time job. It has enabled me to move faster in shipping customer-facing fea…

Your stack is great. If anything, I think many one-man SaaS will benefit from using k8s. That's the superpower of k8s, one person can go from 1node to 1000nodes if they need that scaling with minimal effort. Cobbling together shell scripts and tools for one or two servers is just as much work as using k8s, so long as you don't run your own and use a managed service. Best of luck, I think your list is pretty reasonable.
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