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

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#221

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 8:37 PM UTC

riku_iki wrote: post #182

spyspy wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're just now looking in to GAE, you should likely be using Cloud Run instead. My company is busily migrating everything there and reaping the benefits.

So, this what scares me: in 5 years someone using GAE would be busy with two migrations: classic GAE -> flexible GAE -> and now cloud run?..

Converting (it's more of a conversion than a migration) from flexible GAE to cloud run is super easy, check out the conversion tool I posted in my previous comment.

Basically, your code shouldn't really need to change at all, it's really just your deployment scripts and configs that need to be updated. At their heart flexible GAE and cloud run are both just running Docker containers.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#222

Post by reubens » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

I love your landing page. Accessible, well-balanced... you clearly have garnered a degree of frontend experience to complement the work on the backend

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#223

Post by nodamage » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 8:45 PM UTC

If you're using Stripe for billing how do you handle tax compliance, specifically related to the VAT requirements in each EU country as well as sales tax requirements in each US state?

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#224

Post by xianwen » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 8:57 PM UTC

efortis wrote: post #139

My infrastructure is $2,800/year. There are two Servers load balanced with DNS. Each Server has 3 jails (Nginx, App, DB) and 2 NICs The internal NIC is for replicating the DB, and for the App Servers to target the Primary one. Diagram and Configs: https://blog.uidrafter.com/engineering/freebsd-jails-network...

Very interesting. Do you mind sharing the hardware specifications of your servers? Are you confident that FreeBSD is a secure OS to face the internet, say, as compared to OpenBSD?

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#225

Post by spondyl » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

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.

Some would argue that identity management is the real lock in anyway and while a business may mostly be abstracted from their cloud via Kubes, any Internal IT systems may be such a kludge that moving away is a nightmare hell

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#226

Post by ngrilly » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

mtlynch wrote: post #113

ijamj wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you still with them? If yes, would love to hear why. Otherwise, what made you jump?

I still use GCP, but I avoid locking myself into their proprietary infrastructure when I'm writing new stuff. I feel like Google is far too cavalier about deprecating services and forcing their customers to do migration work. It is hard to replace GCP's managed datastores because I really don't want to maintain my own database server (even if it's a managed service that someone else upgrades for me). So I've stuck to…

You don’t want to maintain your own database server, even managed by GCP, but with SQLite you have to maintain state on GCP Persistent Disks and backups to S3 using Litestream. Why do you think this is easier?

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#227

Post by lemarchr » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

It's probably fine, but reading about a single Postgres container in a Kubernetes cluster with backups to S3 gives me sweaty palms. I hope the author has fully tested their disaster recovery plan.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#228

Post by kaeland » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #31

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.

I've wondered about this as well. I don't have a complete answer, but so far documenting things as I go about doing them helps, especially if I write down what I tried, what went wrong, what worked and why. Its a lot while starting off, but over time as the concepts sink and become habits, my docs move to higher abstractions automatically and then it is mostly clear. The key words for me are 'train of thought'. The s…

I highly recommend org-mode for keeping track of anything dev-related.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#229

Post by amzans » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

lemarchr wrote: post #227

It's probably fine, but reading about a single Postgres container in a Kubernetes cluster with backups to S3 gives me sweaty palms. I hope the author has fully tested their disaster recovery plan.

I use AWS RDS for the production DB :)

The in-cluster Postgres is mainly for experiments or staging.

Re: The architecture behind a one-person tech startup

#230

Post by hu3 » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

knodi wrote: post #61

I have done with before, ran and one man b2b saas platform with 30clients from around the world. Infrastructure was the easiest part. We where processing roughly 100million messages a day, about 5 nodes. Monitoring was good, application performance tracking was good. Business ran for close to 7 years, making about 1.3mill a year on an average year.

What was the hard part?