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Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?

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Re: Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?

#251

Post by aranchelk »

My strategy: get really clear on business needs/objectives/internal SLAs for infrastructure. In my experience a lot of time-consuming stuff revolves around uptime, data recovery (RTO, RPO), security, compliance, and scaling. Depending on your business and the stage you’re in, a lot of that may not matter, so don’t build anything you don’t need now.

I’m a solo-founder, with many years working in IT, and I focused on DevOps for part of it; I know what best practice looks like and it would be easy to fall down that rabbit hole doing an unnecessarily complex buildout. Currently I’m doing a small private beta, I’m avoiding 99% of standard practice. I’ve got a single EC2 node running Redis as the only datastore and NodeJS + Nginx + certbot, a cron to do backups to S3. No CI (there are no other devs to integrate code with) I run all tests locally and push/rollback with rsync. All code, assets, and server config (except creds) are in a monorepo.

If the server goes offline, I will have a little downtime, that’s fine. If I run out of memory for Redis (not likely to happen soon), I’ll change to a different datastore or scale up the node. If I lose data, I can restore from S3, and additionally the architecture is such that clients will re-push their latest changes.

Do the bare minimum to support the business, stick with what you know, outsource what you can, and properly value your time.

Re: Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?

#252

Post by welder »

I'm a solo founder with a product used by 300k+ people. Keep it simple, don't solve problems before they become problems, and keep all config in Git. I would use Heroku, but my usage requirements makes that cost-prohibitive. Heroku is good for low-traffic projects aka Enterprise B2B. I don't use k8s, I just use shell scripts that import each other for setting up new DigitalOcean servers. I separate my shell scripts into 3 categories:

1. common (Google leap second smearing, increase max open connections, misc security and performance changes)

2. infra (install Nginx, install RabbitMQ, install Postgres, install SSDB)

3. product (run common stuff, then infra stuff, then any stuff specific to a single server)

Sometimes it breaks after upgrading Linux, but it's easy to fix. For CI, I use GitHub Actions. Deployments are mostly built with GH Actions. If deployment fails it just keeps the old server code, there is no need for rollbacks I just re-deploy with working code. If deployment passes but there's still a prod bug, I don't rollback. I just commit a revert and deploy that or commit a fix. LetsEncrypt renewal, log aggregation, db backups is all custom with combination of RabbitMQ and CRON + Shell scripts.

I miss out on autoscaling, so someday I'll invest the time to migrate web servers to hosted k8s. With limited time as a solo-founder I have to prioritize for impact meaning incremental improvements usually never get done.

Not having k8s and autoscaling isn't causing any problems, won't increase revenue, and won't save any meaningful expenses so it's currently only an incremental improvement for me.

Finally, I have a small Slack community for bootstrapped founders. Let me know if you want to chat in there about specifics.

Re: Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?

#254

Post by juanse »

TekMol wrote: post #57

I scaled to millions of users as a solo founder and still run the whole show myself. AMA if you like. Here is what works for me: CI: From the terminal, I run my tests and commit to git. Deployments: rsync Rollbacks: Never did one. If something breaks, I fix it and rsync the fix to production. DB: MariaDB k8s: I don't use it. Computers are very fast these days. A cheap single VPS will get you a long way. Nightmare: No…

Which tech stack are you using?

PD: I follow a similar approach. I am glad you said it.

Re: Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?

#255

Post by SergeAx »

First of all: no microsrvices, no Kubernetes. The whole business logic is a two binary (server + cli) monolith in a single container image.

For CI GitLab is a bliss. Lots of examples and articles around the web. I made a test-build-dockerize-tag pipeline once and now just taking it from one project to another with minimal changes.

For deploy - Docker Compose is enough. Maybe Docker Swarm some time in the future. Gitlab hosts docker images, rollback is a simple change of container version.

For Postgres backups I am using WAL archive + daily snapshots from replica.

Re: Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?

#256

Post by epolanski »

kaino128 wrote: post #19

Pieter Levels (the guy who made Nomad List) reached $1 000 000 ARR with a single VPS, all his code in an index.php file and using FTP to transfer the latest code to his server... I think if you’re a solo founder you have to accept on day one you’re at a time disadvantage when it comes to the actual hours you’ll spend on moving the business forward vs admin, ops, legal stuff etc etc and so you have to really fight sma…

What is a HA RDS?

Re: Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?

#258

Post by Sanguinaire »

iKevinShah wrote: post #5
herbst wrote: post #2

I do it KISS. Deployment for me is always a git hook, usually with a private gitea server. So I have versioning and rollbacks available with a cute UI if necessary. DBs run side by side and are simply backed up regularly with whatever backup solution the VPS offers. That's it. Out of school I put way more effort in building my infrastructure but in reality a good VPS, something like Cloudflare and some app based cach…

> Out of school I put way more effort in building my infrastructure but in reality a good VPS, something like Cloudflare and some app based caching can run millions of daily views over 20+ different apps without issues. I read such messages (and also agree to it mostly) and then I encounter my peers wanting active-active clusters with K8s on top or something and I feel I like a dinosaur. Refreshing to see KISS still…

Don't fall victim to resume-driven development; keep on KISSing.

Re: Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?

#259

Post by kureikain »

I divided my infrastructure into two part.

1. Tricky and unfrequent changes: - mail server, load balancer, database etc: for this I just write bootstrap.sh, rsync to server and run. - It's literally just a for server in `foor bar`; scp ; ssh ` done

2. Deployment/Frequent changes: - docker-compose to spin up everything. It's super nice. Again, the deployment is done with a `rsync` then `docker-compose up -f docker-compose-prod.yml`

Eventually when deployment changes very frequent and need scale/ha I added in Kubernetes. K8S is way easiser to setup than you think and it handle all other suff(load balancer, environment variable etc).

And my deploy now become: `kubectl apply -f`

One trick I used is to use `sed` or `envsubst` to replace the image hash.

For backedup, I again, literally setup cronjob from an external server, `ssh` into database and run `pgdump`.

I also have a nice NFS server to centralize config and sync back to our git repo.

I used this whole setup to operate https://hanami.run an email forwarding service for the first 3 months before I added Kubernetes.

Re: Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?

#260

Post by chrisgoman »

ensemblehq wrote: post #94

As a solo founder, your time is the most precious resource so all your DevOps effort should be minimized to the extent that you can prevent and debug issues. In practice, for me, this meant using tools that I'm already comfortable with (preferably in the same language as my codebase to minimize context switching) and resisting making things overly complicated with too many tools in the chain. For automated deployment…

using fabric for deployments (fabric2 kind of a pain but almost got most things ported over) even if our main app is in PHP
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