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11 years of hosting a SaaS

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Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#51

Post by lvangool »

ksajadi wrote: post #14

the progression from Heroku to AWS is very common as SaaS businesses grow. However one thing that’s missing from all “alternatives to Heroku” is what I call life after deployment or Day-2 operations. Many solutions show you a sleek demo of how easily you can deploy a Hello World app to their platform but leave you in a straight jacket when it the app is deployed and you need tools to keep it running, like changing an…

This precisely the niche Cloud 66 tries to fill, it caters for the growth businesses, providing initial ease but without sacrificing control. This allows companies to grow without being forced out before they are ready. (Disclaimer: I work for Cloud 66)

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#52

Post by alsiola »

drawkbox wrote: post #22
rozenmd wrote: post #12

> Use managed services for as long as possible Big agree here. Yes, you can save stupid money by handrolling postgres on an extremely beefy Hetzner server, or you can pay someone else and keep building your product: https://onlineornot.com/self-hosting-vs-managed-services-dec... This isn't to say, "don't bother learning how to do it yourself", but more "learn to pick your battles".

Yes especially data, simplicity is key as well. Where possible go with simple but abstracted cloud storage, cloud tables and then a cloud db that is managed. We use Azure mostly right now but our storage system works across Azure storage, Amazon S3, Google Cloud and others. For tables, Azure Tables mainly. For database with filtering/paging better performant and ACID compliant cloud db, CosmosDB currently which is a…

Really do not share your experience with CosmosDB, some of it's attributes that currently make me miserable include...

- Scaling is not infinite, it's up to 20gb per partition key (1), which can't be changed after document creation.

- One set of global indices, no equivalent to DynamoDB's secondary indices.

- Still can't run their docker container on mac (2) natively.

- Weird SQL-like dialect that's required for all but the simplest queries. JOINs are spectacularly awkward.

- Tooling is horrific. Based on the previous point, no existing tooling works for it (and nobody is building tooling for a DB with such minimal market share). For example, I needed to manually deleted 30 or so documents/rows yesterday - only way to achieve this is with 30 separate click-to-deletes in their UI.

- Minimises analytics options. There exist a plethora of business intelligence type tools that will happily sit on top of most common DBs. None of them like CosmosDB. So you're stuck with synapse link or whatever MS calls it now.

Overall it seems to combine the worst aspects of both RDS and document stores, with the worst aspects of both traditional and serverless infrastructure.

(1) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/partitioni... (2) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/local-emul...

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#53

Post by netfortius »

woutr_be wrote: post #33
erhaetherth wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not that it matters, but there definitely is a tendency in our industry to 'look down' on frontenders as not real engineers and thus not consider them for leadership positions. I think that's funny because there some to be a ton of backenders that can't do frontend at all. And then they want to look down on FE when they can't do it themselves? It's not just basic HTML and CSS if you're building a complex app. I do…

I had the same experience with some backend engineers, they constantly looked down on the front-end engineers, ridiculing JavaScript and CSS. And while all those frontend engineers picked up backend languages and became fullstack developers. Those backend engineers couldn't do the most basic frontend things to save their lives.

... while quite a few understand the fundamentals of infrastructure they consume, and end up in undesirable places (with major impact on performance, costs, or a combination of both). I fairly recently worked for a few months in a web3/blockchain/NFT//crypto-wallet company, and the fact that I had to explain in ELI5 mode how diff types of databases (and how critical such a choice is), name resolution (a.k.a. DNS), global vs local load balancers of different types work, which measurements and logs to enable, and where, reality of redundancy and recovery times, on prem(NO - you cannot rely on moving VMs over L2 connected DCs!) and in the cloud, etc., to "app" (whatever end) folks, with no understanding how these fundamental services [kept] impact[ing] their clients, was an experience I would certainly not remember too dearly. Even a comprehensive explanation of email client headers reading, to an office full of FE and BE engineers, who failed our security tests (joyfully clicked on anything having a link, in a message, 'cause it was presented as an "API PoC"), was revealing in regards to the missing basics. /rant

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#54

Post by maccard »

speedgoose wrote: post #39
Radim wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a generational thing, a matter of familiarity with computing and computers. For someone who's lived through the 80s, "handrolling postgres" doesn't sound nearly as scary as you imagine. I expect the cost/benefit analysis of "handrolling postgres on a beefy Hetzner server" vs "navigating the menus and options of AWS services" would be different for different teams.

I'm looking at the ansible playbooks to setup my favourite beefy baremetal Hetzner server (128GB ram, Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core, 450Gb fast NVME SSD, 3.5TB x2 NVME SSDs, 155€/month): - Install Debian 11 while booted in rescue mode. - Setup the root file system encryption using cryptsetup and dropbear (to enter the key during the boot through SSH). Involves chroot and some fun commands. - Setup ZFS encrypted mirror filesy…

Our terraform config for RDS is about 50 lines of configuration. We get a much smaller instance for our money, but ultimately figuring out all of what you posted isn't a good use of my time (yet).

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#55

Post by mejutoco »

rozenmd wrote: post #12

> Use managed services for as long as possible Big agree here. Yes, you can save stupid money by handrolling postgres on an extremely beefy Hetzner server, or you can pay someone else and keep building your product: https://onlineornot.com/self-hosting-vs-managed-services-dec... This isn't to say, "don't bother learning how to do it yourself", but more "learn to pick your battles".

Or you could use sqlite until you need postgres. I have to admit I reach for postgres immediately when in many cases sqlite would have served me just as well.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#57

Post by jiggawatts »

andai wrote: post #46
jiggawatts wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure App Service is a thing that everyone just skips over, listing competitors with an annual revenue smaller than some individual Azure App Service deployments... I mean seriously, railway.app has just fifteen employees in total, and revenue in the single-digit millions. Reminds me of when someone posted a "cloud storage vendors poster" with hundreds of vendors -- but not Azure -- some with revenues smaller than th…

I think Railway nails the user experience, but basically every time I use it something goes wrong in a small or a big way (build fails randomly, UI glitches, random 404s in the control panel that fix themselves minutes later). Used it for a few clients but it's tough to keep using it with all the issues, so I'm looking at Render and other alternatives. But if Railway could smooth out the reliability / stability, I wo…

PS: I'm not calling out Railway specifically, I just like to laugh at how the second biggest public cloud is just a figment of our collective imaginations.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#58

Post by maccard »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #48
SanderNL wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "modern" stacks are sane enough to "handroll" anymore. Sure, you can do it, but look at the poster in this thread that details the setup of a debian server. Kubernetes, "Argo CD", zero-trust, the sheer amount of "management" is off the chart. "Installation of kube-prometheus-stack helm chart".. "Installation of openebs-zfspv".. It's not postgres that's the problem here.

A lot of "modern" stacks is just complexity for the sake of complexity. Google is doing it so clearly our 5 man startup will face the same scaling problems, or something like that. Many of the problems these tools solve are problems that wouldn't exist building things the old fashioned way. If you stick relatively close to the metal, operating this stuff is pretty easy. However it's notable that a very valid reason t…

The complex stacks are insane to operate yourself but very simple to operate if you use a managed offering instead, and they do provide genuine value.

I can set up a new golang app on ECS with a load balancer and database, with a CI/CD pipeline, with 0 downtime updates in about 30 minutes. Most of that time is waiting for AWS to give me a load balancer. Our work applications have been running with this setup for over 2 years and the only thing Ivs done with infra in that time is adjusted instance sizes and bumped a MySql version.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#59

Post by AndroTux »

> But the worst Digital Ocean incident we ever had was when they turned all our droplets off all at once. The credit card entered into the account had expired, there was no backup card, and the contact email on the account went to a shared inbox that was not monitored. So for probably a month we were getting and ignoring billing alerts, until we really paid attention when everything was offline and not responding to SSH. This wasn’t totally their fault, but at the time it just all felt like a dodgy, shaky setup.

This wasn’t *at all* their fault and there’s nothing dodgy about it. This was entirely your fault, and even mentioning this as a „partly“ negative for DO is imo very wrong. I imagine any other service provider, including Heroku, would have acted the same way. You can’t expect to mooch off a month of service without paying and without consequences. If you don’t pay your bills, service will be interrupted. It’s as simple as that.

Re: 11 years of hosting a SaaS

#60

Post by gwd »

andai wrote: post #47
SPBS wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Substack is definitely scummy in this regard, it's not really the author's choice (although a conscious decision was made to host it on Substack).

I read a Substack article almost every day and still consistently get a little jolt of rage when the overlay fades in. I guess they do it because it works, and if the average person felt the same way, they wouldn't be doing it?

> if the average person felt the same way, they wouldn't be doing it?

You might think this, but I tend to doubt it's true... people making these decisions end up being in their own little bubble, and not really have a good idea what people's actual response is.

That said, I find Substack's pop-up tolerable: I am after all getting someone's work for free, and I'd rather have a simple pop-up that I know I can get rid of than ads or other aggressive forms of pop-ups.

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