Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

anthonynsimon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 334 posts

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#161

Post by anurag »

ashconnor wrote: post #154
anurag wrote: post #143

(Render founder) This is incredible work, and underscores the reason Render exists and is recommended by OP. Everything mentioned in the post is baked into Render already: * Automatic DNS, SSL, and Load Balancing * Automated rollouts and rollbacks * Health checks and zero downtime deploys (let it crash) * Horizontal autoscaling (in early access!) * Application data caching (one-click ClickHouse and Redis) * Built-in…

Do you guys have an ETA on horizontal scaling? I think that's the only feature I saw missing from Digital Ocean App Platform.

Manual scaling is already in GA, and horizontal autoscaling is already available! Get in touch at support@render.com to get early access.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#162

Post by kparaju »

ccmcarey wrote: post #54

Great writeup. How do you handle database migrations when using an otherwise automated CI/CD flow with gradual deployment?

You could probably do something like (for django):

  python manage.py migrate
on pod startup. If there are no changes, it'll do nothing. If there are changes, it'll do the migration.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#163

Post by siruva07 »

smrk007 wrote: post #29
siruva07 wrote: post #19

Has there ever been a one-wo(man) SaaS founder to take a company public?

Do you mean taking a company public without any co-founders and employees, or starting originally with none, then later taking some on? If the latter, I would think Dropbox would count, since at least originally it was a single founder.

I mean IPO’d with one employee - the founder

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#164

Post by biztos »

Good article. My comment might be off topic in which case, please ignore.

If you have a one-person SaaS company, how do you get past customers’ resistance to a single point of failure, namely you?

Do you pretend you’re not just one person? Do you only have customers who could handle losing the service when you, say, run away to meditate on the mountaintop? (Or get run over by a beer truck, or whatever.) Is there some non-obvious solution?

And — back on topic — is the architecture part of that sales pitch? “I’m just one dude, but look how simple this is, it can run itself if I am devoured by mice!”

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#165

Post by shoey »

bombcar wrote: post #12
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.

Document everything in excruciating detail - I go so far as to record all the commands I run; and when complete o destroy the machine and start again (or use a separate system) and verify that I accurately recorded every step. You can add additional text about why you did certain things - and then store the data in a wiki or checked into git or similar so you can find it when you need it.

What is your system for keeping all of these notes. Do you just have a git repo for everything?

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#166

Post by rory »

ashconnor wrote: post #153
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.

>managed DB via magic What product is this?

Google Cloud SQL. I say magic because locally I need a service key to connect to the proxy, but the production app doesn't seem to need anything but the internal google address.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#167

Post by I_am_tiberius »

rory wrote: post #74
I_am_tiberius wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say Netlify has free unlimited scale. There are some limitations, especially the data transfer limit of 100GB.

That's right, I'm exaggerating. At current rates I'll hit that limit at 7.5MM pageviews/month. I've also paid for extra builds once or twice in the past (automatically charges a few dollars when you cross the build time limit), and I pay them $9/mo for analytics.

Are you happy with their analytics? I have no experience with website analytics but I find their offering a bit too minimalistic. I wish for the following features:

- Break down page views into unique visiters for all views (per site, per country etc.). (or some other comparison between those).

- Don't lose the history after 30 days.

- Export to .xlsx

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#168

Post by wakatime »

ccmcarey wrote: post #54

Great writeup. How do you handle database migrations when using an otherwise automated CI/CD flow with gradual deployment?

He's using Django, so most likely Django Migrations which is built into that framework. If you're using Flask, you're probably using Alembic with SQLAlchemy. Those are the two main ways to handle schema migrations in Python.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#169

Post by dangrossman »

biztos wrote: post #164

Good article. My comment might be off topic in which case, please ignore. If you have a one-person SaaS company, how do you get past customers’ resistance to a single point of failure, namely you? Do you pretend you’re not just one person? Do you only have customers who could handle losing the service when you, say, run away to meditate on the mountaintop? (Or get run over by a beer truck, or whatever.) Is there some…

I've made a living running one-person SaaS sites for over 20 years, many of them in the same space as OP (analytics stuff). I can't recall a customer ever asking how many employees there are. It just doesn't come up. I don't think small business customers care. Maybe it matters for more enterprise salesy type businesses.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#170

Post by ptudan »

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…

If you have a DAO layer in your code, it shouldn't be too significant of a refactor to switch between noSQL vendors for simple tables.

The real heavy lifting would be if you've optimized your tables to that specific architecture. You might need to re-design a lot of your schemas.

Post reply on HN