How much time do you spend doing DevOps?
As indie hackers, and solo founders, it's common to handle most parts of running the business ourselves. From a technical point of view, how often do you find yourself scaling servers, renewing SSL certificates, and general DevOps related work?
Do you enjoy this aspect?
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No time at all. Vercel / Netlify / Render / Firebase / Hasura just make dev-ops redundant IMO and all of them scale very far on their free tier.
Initial setup took me around 1 week, after that I spend few hours for every quarter. I run my apps on cheap hosting that's why I spend a lot of time to setup multiple servers. I setup automatic Let's Encrypt renewal, server monitoring, logging, search, distributed storage, all in Kubernetes.
This is long before DigitalOcean offer managed Kubernetes.
In the beginning, I was setting up all of my servers and services by myself (learning from places like Servers For Hackers).
As time went by, I've noticed that:
As I've written in a reply to your other post, paying ~$25/month for solutions like Laravel Forge and Envoyer was a net gain for me. It saved me a lot of time, I stopped second-guessing the security of my infrastructure and was able to focus on development.
Almost zero until recently when I moved one of my apps from Heroku to Digital Ocean. It took me 2 days to set up deployment, logging, monitoring and alerting.
We had it similar. We started on Heroku which I was able to set up in couple hours and we were quite happy for the first six months and less happy for the next six months (cost was growing and everything was running to slow). Luckily, brother of my co-founder is experienced in DevOps, managing large networks of computers, building infrastructures, etc., so we able to help us in setting everything and moving to Digital Ocean, also setting up further machines, backups, etc. We are thinking of rebuilding the infrastructure again and moving to Hetzner where it will be cheaper and better. And he will be joining our team fulltime in next two weeks, looking forward to working with him more.
Awesome. Digital Ocean is great. Lower learning curve than AWS, and cheaper. How do you deploy your app?
I'm deploying with Dokku. It offers quite familiar experience to Heroku. What about you?
I founded Amezmo, but I also use it to deploy and host my own projects.
Honestly don’t bother keeping a VM as a pet. Or worse have a farm of Kubernetes cattle.
Just use Heroku and pay them $7 or whatever it is for a dyno. Connect it to your github, spend 5 minutes pointing your dns at it and then relax!
True that brother!
Most indie hackers wont need to worry about this in most cases until you start growing, small nodes are pretty fast. Once you really start growing define Kubernetes artifacts and deploy on the cloud with load balancers, assuming you've been building containers.
This can easily be automated with cert bot & lets encrypt
Make a CI/CD pipeline. Build releases and deploy them in containers. Automate everything surrounding.
Almost 0.
We only choose really stable tools that needs no maintenance.
I've made the mistake in the past where I wanted to do everything custom and host kubernetes, with postgres, and Prometheus and Cubejs etc. etc.
It ended up being a devops nightmare.
In the beginning, go simple, go with a managed solution that just works and hopefully it's scalable. If it's not scalable just make sure by the time you need to scale, the business will be able to afford a full-time devops employee.
Don't waste your founder hours on devops.
I totally agree. Managed services like Heroku save a bunch of time.
Very little, I host https://keycombiner.com on PythonAnywhere.
I would strongly recommend using a PaaS offering for a side-project SaaS instead of setting up everything yourself.
As an Indie Hacker, you should focus more on your product/customers and less on anything else (unless it's something you want to learn) In the end customers don't care about your stack or DevOps, so why invest much time doing it manually?
I use Heroku, it takes less than 5mins to set up, and to deploy things I just push to Github. Easy fast and reliable. And now I can focus on what matters
About 20 minutes but only when I start a new project and that is not daily; maybe a couple of times a month on average. I use netlify, firebase, google cloud, github and gitlab, google domains and cloudflare for domains.