The architecture behind a one-person tech startup • Hacker News Board

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#121

Post by waprin » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

fnord77 wrote: post #80

rory wrote: post #28

My one-man-SaaS setup: - Static frontend hosted on Netlify (free unlimited scale) - Backend server on Google App Engine (connecting to Gcloud storage and managed DB via magic) I realize I'm opening myself up to vendor lock-in and increased costs down the road (if I even get that far), but I've wrangled enough Docker/k8s/Ingress setups in the past to know it's just not worth the time and effort for a non-master.

cloud vendor lock-in fears are overblown. pricing and features will always be competitive between the big vendors. I suspect people waste a lot of time/money trying to be cloud agnostic. Real vendor lock-in is when you have decades of code written against an Oracle DB and you're getting charged outrageous Oracle rates and it would also cost a fortune migrate.

Vendor lock-in depends heavily on exactly what vendor you’re using and especially if it’s OSS API hosted on the vendor or a vendor API.

If you use something like AppEngine to run a Flask or Django app, you will not be locked in much because those are open source libraries with well known runtime options elsewhere.

Same to some extent with any sort of managed OSS database.

If you use something like Cloud Datastore or Firestore or DynamoDB , you are using a proprietary API and will have to rewrite all your client calls , or write an extensive shim, and probably significantly re architect to port.

Even in the “hosted OSS” option there are usually some vendor specific stuff but it can vary a lot. Something like AppEngine specifically used to be an absurd amount of API lock-in but has evolved over the years to be more of a general container runtime.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#122

Post by yalogin » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

This is probably not the best place to ask this question, but as a solo founder or just to reduce costs/time are there some standard free software packages that are used when creating sites? For example most sites need a user sign up mechaism, a authN and authX mechanism to gate access to different pages. Are there open source projects that provide this? Or do site owners develop these from scratch every time?

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#123

Post by ryanSrich » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #122

This is probably not the best place to ask this question, but as a solo founder or just to reduce costs/time are there some standard free software packages that are used when creating sites? For example most sites need a user sign up mechaism, a authN and authX mechanism to gate access to different pages. Are there open source projects that provide this? Or do site owners develop these from scratch every time?

Depending on your software stack, there are several open source projects that can provide functionality out of the box.

If you don't mind paying just a little bit of money, you can get even more out of the box SaaS like functionality with tools like Jumpstart (if you're using Rails).

https://jumpstartrails.com/

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#124

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #122

This is probably not the best place to ask this question, but as a solo founder or just to reduce costs/time are there some standard free software packages that are used when creating sites? For example most sites need a user sign up mechaism, a authN and authX mechanism to gate access to different pages. Are there open source projects that provide this? Or do site owners develop these from scratch every time?

[deleted]

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#125

Post by glutamate » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #122

This is probably not the best place to ask this question, but as a solo founder or just to reduce costs/time are there some standard free software packages that are used when creating sites? For example most sites need a user sign up mechaism, a authN and authX mechanism to gate access to different pages. Are there open source projects that provide this? Or do site owners develop these from scratch every time?

Depends on the framework you use. Rails and Django have a lot of this built in or as widely used plug-ins. In node.js you have to do a lot from scratch every time, or you can use a service that provides this like Auth0

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#126

Post by mmargerum » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

fnord77 wrote: post #80

rory wrote: post #28

My one-man-SaaS setup: - Static frontend hosted on Netlify (free unlimited scale) - Backend server on Google App Engine (connecting to Gcloud storage and managed DB via magic) I realize I'm opening myself up to vendor lock-in and increased costs down the road (if I even get that far), but I've wrangled enough Docker/k8s/Ingress setups in the past to know it's just not worth the time and effort for a non-master.

cloud vendor lock-in fears are overblown. pricing and features will always be competitive between the big vendors. I suspect people waste a lot of time/money trying to be cloud agnostic. Real vendor lock-in is when you have decades of code written against an Oracle DB and you're getting charged outrageous Oracle rates and it would also cost a fortune migrate.

My worry with these providers is I get locked out of my accounts for some arbitrary reason or bug.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#127

Post by mmargerum » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

iamgopal wrote: post #63

rory wrote: post #28

My one-man-SaaS setup: - Static frontend hosted on Netlify (free unlimited scale) - Backend server on Google App Engine (connecting to Gcloud storage and managed DB via magic) I realize I'm opening myself up to vendor lock-in and increased costs down the road (if I even get that far), but I've wrangled enough Docker/k8s/Ingress setups in the past to know it's just not worth the time and effort for a non-master.

People here underestimate google app engine a lot. But I doubt if there is better one person Saas service out there.

I'm not a big fan of google but i have to say that GAE solves a lot of problems I don't want to deal with.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#128

Post by marsven_422 » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

waprin wrote: post #121

fnord77 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cloud vendor lock-in fears are overblown. pricing and features will always be competitive between the big vendors. I suspect people waste a lot of time/money trying to be cloud agnostic. Real vendor lock-in is when you have decades of code written against an Oracle DB and you're getting charged outrageous Oracle rates and it would also cost a fortune migrate.

Vendor lock-in depends heavily on exactly what vendor you’re using and especially if it’s OSS API hosted on the vendor or a vendor API. If you use something like AppEngine to run a Flask or Django app, you will not be locked in much because those are open source libraries with well known runtime options elsewhere. Same to some extent with any sort of managed OSS database. If you use something like Cloud Datastore or…

That's why you have a IDataContex abstraction and depend on that abstraction...this is software architecture 101

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#129

Post by Arubis » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

wmichelin wrote: post #9

How do you start learning this breadth of software engineering? I consider myself good in the python / django space, but where do I start with learning these infrastructure technologies? I find that I use them once or twice periodically, and then don't touch them for so long, so I forget much of what I have learned.

Addressing the implicit "am I doing career wrong?": there's folks that find working broadly across the whole stack really compelling (I am one of them) that will visibly have exposure to a _lot_ of stuff. Those folks (I am again one of them) are likely looking at your work and worriedly feeling as though they are Doing Career Wrong because they don't have your depth. Apologies if I'm merely projecting; my hope is that this is supportive.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#130

Post by kparaju » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

Thanks for a great post! It was super detailed and I loved reading it. I had a quick question about your pg setup. You mentioned that you use EBS for your persistence storage, which is locked by zone . You can't have an EC2 instance in Zone 1 mount a storage in Zone 3. Does this cause issues with your db? Especially as you have HPA and ClusterAutoscaler, your k8s nodes could be spun up in Zone 1 for pg autoscaling but your data is in Zone 3.