Thank you for the sharing!
About pricing:
- Do you have any tool for cloud pricing tuning/estimations ?
- Are you using specific tool to track all your expenses in general ?
The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS
81–90 of 259 posts
Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
SaaS business single founder here, moved from a mix of GCP's Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, and Compute Engine to DO's managed Postgres and Kubernetes, and it has had the follow effects: - Much cheaper, reducing bill from >100$/month to ~40$. Important for early stage startups - More performance, easier scaling. Found that my application was much better suited to run in K8S, but this is definitely specific to my use-case - Co…
Did you experience the downtime issues with DigitalOcean managed Kubernetes that the author also experienced? I'm also considering DOKS so would be great to know!
Note: source for this information is from discussions with DO via support and the kubernetes slack. I am not affiliated with DO in any way.
The downtime issues with DOKS are directly related to the resources allocated to the control plane, which is not set up in a HA capacity. The resources assigned are directly related to the size/number of nodes you use. API-heavy applications can very easy knock out the control plane, and in that situation is takes it a (relatively) long time to recover on it's own (I would typically see ~4hr before it became responsive again).
Their support team is able to modify the master resources for a given cluster (to assist with recovery), but the turn-around time on that shouldn't be considered "production ready".
At this point my advice for DOKS would be:
- Are you using very basic, out-of-the-box Kubernetes to host "apps"? You will probably be fine, but be sure to have a back-up.
- Are you planning to use Operators, or anything that heavily interacts with the kube-api? I would recommend not using it, or over-provisioning your cluster (which would very quickly offset the advantage of the "free" managed masters).
I know that they are working on fixing some of these reliability issues and I have hopes that it will be more stable shortly.
At this time I have a "stable" cluster which (unless their support lied to me) had master resources manually increased by their support team after the 3rd incident of it dying. I haven't had an issue since then.
Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! To clarify, this has already helped me to ship features to my customers quickly. I actually spend little time working on the stack. Last time I touched the infrastructure components was probably a few weeks ago. Panelbear was originally built and launched in a weekend ($5/mo DO instance with SQLite), and I've been working on it for the past 3 months. I have been releasing a new featu…
That's really great, happy to hear. I didn't mean to refute what you shared. In fact I was reinforcing some of your points. Doing things the cheap way is arguably the best way. Learning new tech while building is good, but I wouldn't recommend new tech to build a SaaS. My concern was copycats. Some starters reading your post may have this feeling that "because Panelbear did it with Clickhouse and Kubernetes and Djang…
> used what he knew best, he was able to focus on getting customers
That's what I was going for :) Now I realize that I should have highlighted that part more on the blog post.
Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS
#84It's cool that this stack works for the author, but if anyone is just starting out on their own one-person journey to build a product, I don't think they should follow the stack in this article. There are too many dependencies and too much complexity here. Kubernetes is overkill for 95% of applications, especially single founder SaaS businesses. Clickhouse may make sense for an analytics product but caring and feedin…
> The whole "cattle not pets" thing is fine once you obtain product market fit and your product needs to scale up. At that point you'll have time and money to do it - before then you're just wasting cycles. Is this true? At my last company we wasted a bunch of time every week dealing with the accumulation of ad-hoc changes in different environments creating different behavior. When we pivoted to a continuous deployme…
> Is this true? At my last company we wasted a bunch of time every week dealing with the accumulation of ad-hoc changes in different environments creating different behavior.
That is an issue a disciplined one-man operation won't have since (generally) they have a Dev and a Prod environment, the changes would be made in Dev first then duplicated in Prod.
If you have 2+ developers, you have environment drift like you experienced because (generally) Dev is the local environment on the laptop or otherwise a distinct environment for each developer. So now you have 3+ environments you need to sync and then discipline starts to fall apart as you have to communicate every change.
Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS
#85This seems like an awful small share of managed services for a one-man show.
I mean, K8s? Come on!
Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS
#86As a one-man team operating a 10+ year old SaaS product, I’ve done two things that have helped keep things sustainable. The frontend continues to be server generated. PJAX style partial page updates is (mostly) dynamic enough. The maintenance burden of operating a JavaScript frontend is too high to justify for a 1-2 person team. The second thing I’ve done is avoid containers. VMs work fine for many types of applicati…
You didn't seem to get much of a reaction, probably because of your recommendations to go with proven (read: old & boring) tech, but I appreciate it. Front-end churn is real and, coupled with rapidly evolving and ever-abstracting containerization approaches, staying on top of it is a full-time job, best done as an employee.
Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS
#87Serial one-man SaaS builder here with a pair of soft-landings and one big hit: I would agree with others who have opined that this is overkill. You couldn't pay me to use Terraform or Kubernetes for my SaaS unless it was a much larger team. My stack usually consists of this: A framework I am comfortable with that removes a lot of boilerplate (happens to be the one I know best in the language I know best), the databas…
OOC what framework do you use? More broadly, can you help me with an opinion on my present struggle? Here goes: I have a lot of ideas, a couple of which solve problems for me and I think are even _good_ ideas. However, none have shipped because I'm spending an inordinate amount of time building out what is essentially my own SaaS template. Is it worth investing the time in doing that, or are some of the commercial Sa…
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Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS
#88It's cool that this stack works for the author, but if anyone is just starting out on their own one-person journey to build a product, I don't think they should follow the stack in this article. There are too many dependencies and too much complexity here. Kubernetes is overkill for 95% of applications, especially single founder SaaS businesses. Clickhouse may make sense for an analytics product but caring and feedin…
Kubernetes honestly isn't that complicated. It's complexity really only scales with the complexity of the system you're running on it. If you're just bringing up a database and a backend on top of it, it's honestly very simple to get running on a single linux box using something like microk8s. And, as a benefit, you can move everything over to EKS or GKE in like a few hours max, if you ever need to scale.
I think (one of) the big win(s) with k8s is testing in namespaces at a pace that doesn't really slow you down. If you think you'd want to do end2end against an environment entirely built by code, k8s is a really good building block.
If you think a one man band and his ruby app can probably go pretty far with self-discipline, but if I'm choosing to do any sort of IaC I'd probably recommend looking at k8s as a) a faster solution, b) a more versatile solution and c) largely vendor agnostic solution.
Point being, I'd probably recommend folks learn to use k8s before they invest time learning lambda, EC2, or ECS, but if you're a small team and you already have lambda, EC2, or ECS, and it's working for you, then it's hard to argue for change.
Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS
#89Have you considered Amazon’s SES for transactional email?
Just a single data point warning: I've had nothing but bad experiences with blacklisted, shared IPs from SES. Everything gets flagged as spam.
Re: The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS
#90It's cool that this stack works for the author, but if anyone is just starting out on their own one-person journey to build a product, I don't think they should follow the stack in this article. There are too many dependencies and too much complexity here. Kubernetes is overkill for 95% of applications, especially single founder SaaS businesses. Clickhouse may make sense for an analytics product but caring and feedin…
SaaS business single founder here, moved from a mix of GCP's Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, and Compute Engine to DO's managed Postgres and Kubernetes, and it has had the follow effects: - Much cheaper, reducing bill from >100$/month to ~40$. Important for early stage startups - More performance, easier scaling. Found that my application was much better suited to run in K8S, but this is definitely specific to my use-case - Co…
Is it okay to touch base with you directly? I would love to hear your feedback and how we can help. Nothing to sell.
- PM for DO Kubernetes.