amzans

Technically, it’s not much different from using Ansible to run Docker on remote hosts.

What it provides is a set of conventions based on what most web apps look like.

Eg. built-in proxy with automatic TLS and zero downtime deployments, first-class support for a DB and cache, encrypted secrets, etc.

It’s definitely not for every use case, but for your typical 3-tier monolith on a handful of servers I found it does the job well.

Thanks for the feedback. There's certainly room for improvement.

Hey, I'm the guy behind GetDeploying. To be clear:

This is a side project and the vast majority of companies were added by me without being paid for it. I now charge to get listed or add a banner because the site takes too much time for me to maintain.

And totally agree, AMD GPUs are not covered enough. Happy to list your company at no cost to help me fix that. Feel free to email me if interested.

Hey I'm the author of the post.

We ran Panelbear for about a year before merging it into Cronitor's codebase.

Cronitor is also a Django monolith but on EC2 and was already humming along nicely for several years through frequent traffic spikes.

We had no reliability issues with K8s, but came down to: as a small team we decided to have less moving parts.

The new setup is not too different from what I describe here: https://anthonynsimon.com/blog/kamal-deploy/

Thanks, that makes sense. I'll update this so it's clearer.

Just a few days ago I learned that iPhones come with a built-in image scanner in the notes app.

Interestingly: It was a senior citizen in a local shop who pointed that to me when I needed to scan some documents for him.

Definitely agree.

I think the problem is that it’s usually easier to arrive at complex solution than a simple one.

Healthchecks is a great service!

Not sure if you tried it too but https://cronitor.io/ supports more complex alerting rules like the one you describe.

As a bonus, you can also create uptime checks and status pages under the same roof.

Full-disclosure: I work at Cronitor, happy to help if you have any questions :)

Hey! I'm the author of the post, glad you enjoyed it!

Yes, you would just attach it to the network switch and have it join the cluster.

The control plane will "discover" the additional capacity and redistribute workloads if necessary.

With k3s, a new node can join the cluster with a single command (assuming you have the API token).

Something like:

  $ curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | K3S_URL=https://$YOUR_SERVER_NODE_IP:6443 K3S_TOKEN=$YOUR_CLUSTER_TOKEN sh -

Denis, first of all: really cool product!

It’s also fair to ask for registration in order to prevent abuse / record consent for terms and privacy.

However, it would be best if you asked that before uploading the photo. Many people seem frustrated that their data was processed and now they must create an account to see the result/delete the data.

Once again, it looks great, it’s just an expectation/transparency issue :)

Edit: If it’s ok for you to disclose this, what kind of infra are you running on? Just curious.

I'm also interested in this, and someone recently shared this with me: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/taxjar

Apparently Stripe's acquisition of TaxJar is meant to expand their offerings in sales tax compliance.

From the article:

As the latest addition to Stripe’s revenue platform, TaxJar will help businesses automate tasks such as:

- Providing accurate sales tax rates at checkout, tied to the exact street address of the customer.

- Automatically submitting tax returns to local jurisdictions and remitting the sales tax collected.

- Producing local jurisdiction reports to show sales and sales tax collected—not only for each state, but for relevant counties, cities, and other special jurisdictions.

- Evaluating a company’s products and intelligently suggesting the right product tax code.

Thanks for the transparency, it’s cool to see other bootstrapped founders running Kubernetes :) And congrats on the launch!

Just wanted to say thank you for writing this Michael. You've been putting lots of great content on your blog! Really enjoying the real world examples you include.

I think there’s many nice OSS websites (and docs) built with Docusaurus [1].

It’s not exclusively for CLI projects, and their own website is pretty nice IMO.

[1] https://docusaurus.io/showcase

In short, it’s painful :)

Looking into a Stripe plugin like https://www.quaderno.io/

I really enjoy using Stripe, and their support is great, but sales tax compliance makes me a bit jealous of those using Paddle.

I use AWS RDS for the production DB :)

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

Hey no worries :) I think my reply came off differently than I meant it.

I just wanted to complement your sentiment.

I agree with you in terms of using what you already know best.

If you're not already familiar with these tools consider using a managed platform first, for example Render or DigitalOcean's App Platform (not affiliated, just heard great things about both). They will help you focus on your product, and still gain many of the benefits I talk about here.

And:

I use Kubernetes on AWS, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need this. I learned these tools over several years mentored by a very patient team. I'm productive because this is what I know best, and I can focus on shipping stuff instead. Your mileage may vary.

I actually spend very little time on infrastructure after the initial setup (a week of part time work, since then a couple of hours per month tops).

For comparison, this post describing what I did took nearly a month of on-and-off work. But I might just be slow at writing :)

Nothing like bringing down the entire production cluster and all services with it on a Friday afternoon due to a seemingly innocent "hotfix". Big learnings at the time, but now these make for good stories.

I learned most of these tools at my day job through some catastrophic failures. From my experience, failure has always been the best teacher.

Kubernetes just happens to be a great sandbox for failing hard :) Lots of stories here: https://k8s.af/

However, I wouldn't reach for tools that didn't solve a problem I truly have, be it cost-effective scaling (my day job), or reusing what I already know best even if unconventional (my SaaS).

I guess what I'm trying to say is: focus on solving your immediate problems first with the tools you already know. Your toolbelt will expand without you realizing it.

Thank you! I appreciate it. Glad you found it helpful.

As someone with a graveyard of failed projects and a few with moderate success, I agree with this advice.

I have a day job, and run my SaaS as a side-business, so maybe not the OP’s aspirations. However, I want to add one point:

“...happy to be reminded that others have failed many more times before finally getting their overnight success.”

Don’t build optimizing for overnight success, that’s essentially a casino.

Waiting a few weeks to see what sticks and what doesn’t is way too short based my experience.

From PG’s essays:

“Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going.”

And while ideally you’d validate the product as quickly as possible, most businesses can take years to truly take off. Often involving many pivots along the way.

Maybe I misunderstood, but don’t make “overnight success” your north star.

The scope of this breach is frightening.

Would be great to better understand how the Lastpass credentials got leaked in the first place.

Anyone found any comment on that?

Hey it's nice you're offering this!

I'd just be careful with ultra-low prices, specially if you plan on having backups and multiple months/years of data retention.

Infrastructure costs alone can add up really fast, and don't underestimate how many hours of support a single customer might require.

Just friendly advice :)

Hey I'm happy you gave Panelbear a try! It's always nice to hear someone is using what I've built.

Regarding the free tier, I decided to offer it after hearing many people saying "I wish there was a free alternative for a blog that gets less than <50k views per year" :)

There's no strings attached. Only volume limits and shorter data retention (to prevent my AWS costs from blowing up).

About traffic spikes (eg. reaching the front page of HN): even if you go over the limits, the system won't start rate limiting you for another 72 hours - that way you won't lose data during traffic spikes.

Hope it helps!

I believe the key is to solve the problems that are getting between you and your goals, not potential issues you think one day will be yours.

You can use boring tech to solve exciting problems, or use exciting tech to solve boring problems.

Personally, I find joy in just shipping stuff, so I use what I know best.

I do try out new stuff every once in a while. Some new tools stick, others don’t. But that’s just updating my tool belt, not fixing my problems.

Yes, I moved my comment right after posting as there were two alternative discussions going on, and I wasn't certain on which one to post.

If you didn't act bad in the past I would trust you, but this is not the case.

I apologize if I posted too often once again.

If anyone finds it useful, I just discovered HN has a "delay" feature:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024

I just set it to 5 minutes - in my case it's enough time to edit/review the comment before it's visible.

Thanks for sharing! Will consider it for future projects.

It’s nice to see that there’s an MFA option, and login notifications coming soon. I build this into my small projects too - even if unconventional - because I like to be warned about unusual activity on my accounts. Last thing you’d want is someone taking over a super user or staff account without anyone noticing.

Just a small note: would be nice to have a page describing your security practices.

Congrats on the launch!

Thanks, that’s helpful advice.

I have offered a free plan for my SaaS from day one, with quite generous limits, on a niche with mostly paid-only alternatives. I think it comes down to tradeoffs.

As a self-funded solo founder, this has helped me gain many users since launch, which give me plenty feedback and help to validate new product features without having lots of marketing effort so far.

I don't sell any data, or display ads on free accounts. The reason to upgrade is more capacity, or complementary features for business users (e.g. alerts or organisation/team accounts).

That said, a couple of things to consider:

- Do your numbers: if you have 100 free users for every paying customer, are you going to be profitable? Can you handle the costs?

- In my experience, free users tend to attract more free users.

- They can generate a lot of support pressure, but handled right can be a great way to understand your customers problems. Handled wrong can kill you.

- Expect a small percentage of free users to cause the most trouble. From creating several accounts with different email addresses, to publicly complaining about the free plan being limited, to requesting lots of features only to switch to another free product once it's time to upgrade.

- If you're targeting B2B, price might not be as much of a factor as you might think. Are you going to save or make money for other businesses?

I could talk more about this, but will probably write a blog post one day with more learnings once I have them.

I’m happy to offer a free plan as long as it’s sustainable and I can see the benefits. So far it’s going great for me, but know what you’re getting into, and be sure you can handle the costs both in time and money with low conversion rates vs a trial model.

Edit: I moved the comment to this discussion as it's more fitting. I removed the link to my product.

That's great to hear! Thanks for the nice words.

In case it's useful, I'm slowly releasing the next set of features related to Performance Monitoring, including alerts and integrations (e.g. Slack).

The reason being: it'd be great to get notified when something seems off vs having to check the dashboards all the time.