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61 Comments

Do you struggle with dev ops?

I've met quite a few developers recently, and on IH especially that struggle with dev ops.

Wondering if an egghead.io like service specifically for dev ops would be useful.

Some topics I think would be interesting

  • scale from 0 - 10,000 users

  • scale from 10k - 100k users

  • kubernetes

  • major cloud vendors -> go through each and show how to get something up and online quickly

Anything else you think would be interesting?

  1. 6

    If I find devOps difficult, I can use PaaS like Render, Heroku, Python anywhere, glitch instead. So I can focus on the core service

    1. 1

      Thanks for your thoughts Benny.

      Do you think there's any value for you personally to learn dev ops?

      1. 1

        Don't get me wrong. devOps is definitely important for hosting apps.

        I am using docker compose to host my django apps. However, it still takes me 1 - 2 days to set up new server, SSL, django app, docker compose yml, etc.

        My usage was just serving as an API proxy for my simple startup name generator. So I was looking for alternatives as I suggested.

        1. 2

          ah interesting. 1-2 days is VERY painful IMO.

          Maybe the value prop is something like:

          "Production grade app deployment in less than 1 hour"
          or "CI/CD for indie hackers"

          I guess I'm asking if a course on dev ops to get your django apps up and running behind ssl in an hour instead of 1-2 days would be something you'd consider paying for?

          I'm thinking a free tier with helpful videos and a paid version with more in depth videos + code to help people get started.

          1. 2

            I am sorry, but nobody can fully understand deployments in 1 hour.

            We should encourage indie hackers that opt in to run their servers to actually know what they are doing.

            1. 2

              no not understand them in an hour... get the work done to deploy something in under an hour.

              1. 1

                Marketing-wise it's a proposition that will probably work, but should you aim for it? Most people would deploy and forget it, not learning all that ground work at all.

                I interviewed people claiming they are deploying their apps themselves. I found out it was just something they found online. They could not vet if it's actually secure or what's the implications of their choices.

                Just something to think about :).

                Teaching 1-hour deployments are completely okay if it's aimed towards experience DevOps people, but not beginners.

                1. 1

                  that's true, and thanks for your thoughts.

                  I think you're hung up on the 1 hour thing. I didn't mean it as the course/video takes an hour.

                  I just meant that thing that took you 1-2 days should have only taken an hour. The knowledge you gained by using the service would be what shortens that gap for you.

          2. 1

            My problem was mainly because the certbot image is hard to use. It requires to generate a fake cert before getting a real cert.

            There is an automation script but it required http acme challenge with 80 port. Some tricky steps lie in between.

            I don't go with the PaaS because the project is not worth. Python anywhere also doesn't provide redis.

            For other junior developer, the education material may be good. But I already pass through it. You can research them

            Personally, I will prefer an auto tool to scaffold a django project + SSL in docker compose and dockerfile.

            1. 1

              On a side note, just use the free version of cloudflare, includes ssl, scales over multiple servers, takes 5mins to setup and you'll never have to deal with the certbot stuff ever again.

              1. 1

                Flexible SSL provided by Cloudflare only encrypts the trip between visitors and Cloudflare. Also, it will cause redirect too many times. The trip between Cloudflare and your server is not protected

                https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/67930/are-there-any-disadvantages-to-cloudflare-s-flexible-ssl

                1. 1

                  You have the option to choose full SSL (free aswell) that also encrypts the connection between cloudflare and the origin server.

            2. 1

              I understand the skipping of PAAS, I'm wary of them too.

              But to spend 1-2 days to get this set up is a lot.

              like certbot for example has many different challenges. the http one is just one of like 5. You can do one where you just put a txt record in your domain, and that's it. Takes 5-10 minutes mostly waiting for the dns to update.

              I'm really just curious now. So here's an example of a problem that takes you 1-2 days. I know I could get that down for you to like 1 hour. Probably less. And you still don't think it would be worth it?

              Do you feel like a course is a "JR dev" solution?

              p.s. appreciate you engaging with me on this. this is super helpful!

              1. 1

                1 - 2 days is mainly due to the certbot container incident. I can get my django project page up in 1 - 2 hours. My concern is mainly handling this SSL & certbot tragedy.

                Yes I also know that there're different kinds of challenges besides http.

                At that time, I have another set of docker compose app running so port 80 is not available for acme http challenge. This was a mistake I overlooked at first.

                If I redo it again, I will use Python anywhere $6 hobby plan with postgresql db. This way, I can get it up with same cost now and no need to care about devops stuff. A small project anyway.

                But I don't have the crystal ball before. Course? No, I am quite tired reading too many docs (just like aws docs). Too many learning already. A few tutorials are still ok

                Course gives me an image like aCoursera 10-day course

                1. 1

                  haha. I see. Course fatigue. I guess I always looked at looking stuff up on stack overflow and watching videos was just part what comes with being a developer :)

                  I was thinking more along the lines of little 5-10 minute courses that just help you solve one problem.

                  Like:

                  • Get an ssl cert with certbot - 5 minutes
                  • deploy a docker container on heroku - 5 minutes
  2. 2

    Honestly speaking, can you point out an IH project that actually need Kubernetes?

    I believe in the opposite when comes to side projects. One minimal virtual private server and a small setup where you own and understand everything.

    Or perhaps you want to cover both?

    Anyway if someone from IH wants to step up their understanding of deployments I am making Deployment from Scratch. No k8s there though.

  3. 2

    I accidentally deleted my earlier comment, but thinking a bit more about this, I could possibly find this service useful. It's just hard because I would want something comprehensive, but at the same time I can be pretty opinionated about the tools I use. I think if most developers are like that, it would be a hard line to walk.

    1. 1

      Yeah this is always my hesitation about building things for devs. It’s a love hate relationship for sure 🤦‍♂️

  4. 1

    I am struggling with Devops. I don't want to use Heroku and such. I am a dev, I would like to do it on my own - sometimes people hire me to do it for them so..

    I really don't want to worry much about scale right now, I just want to be able to deploy a range of apps using docker and make it easy to make releases. Just that for now.

    1. 1

      Thanks for this specific use case.

      Have you checked out google's cloud run? It's my go-to for getting stateless docker container on the internets.

      1. 1

        Thanks! I will have a look

  5. 1

    Would like to help. I am handling around 10 servers, well actually grafana is doing it for me.

    Action for the failures, some scripts are there others in todo. Also scripts for migrating.

    It's true, if you are struggling many may be doing same - because they couldn't find proper solution or too many changes to get to the end goal.

    1. 1

      help as in publish videos? That would be awesome!

  6. 1

    I would 100% be interested in this.
    As someone who wanted to learn front-end stuff first, I pretty much got married to firebase (many front-end Udemy courses use firebase for obvious reasons). Now firebase is the backbone of all my projects, but its flaws/limitations are becoming more glaring every day. I want to be able to use more flexible solutions (like AWS), but I don't know where to start. I imagine this is common for self-taught devs, since every online course uses either firebase or heroku for teaching purposes.

    It seems like every tutorial out there assumes you already sort of know what you're doing. If there were some video series that would walk me through every step of how to set up an SQL server on AWS or GC, I would totally pay for that.

    1. 1

      Really appreciate your candid thoughts.

      Perhaps another angle is "Back end development for front-end devs"?

      I suspect there's an opportunity there as well!

  7. 1

    Learning resources are definitely an opportunity to work on in my opinion. I've spent 10+ years in the developer productivity market and am now building a Terraform GitOps framework. I am convinced there are lots and lots of teams out there, that would appreciate a learning resource like what you propose.

    With my framework, I'm also trying to close the knowledge gap. My argument is, we wouldn't build applications from scratch but use a framework instead. So why are we building our infrastructure automation from scratch? The lack of high-level tooling for infrastructure automation is holding teams back. Writing Terraform from scratch is like writing Java from scratch.

    Getting back to the learning aspect. I believe open-source frameworks are a great learning opportunity. Step-by-step tutorials and the community around it help people make progress while they are still learning.

    1. 2

      Really appreciate your thoughts. And best of luck with the Terraform GitOps project. Terraform gives me nightmares and I agree there's a huge gap there. I know teams at public companies that struggle deeply to move quickly because of this problem.

      Excellent point on open source frameworks. That may actually be a great distribution model:

      Go to popular open source ops frameworks ->
      do tutorials on them (free) ->
      contact the maintainers and ask if they can list it in the README ->
      and then provide enough value in the "premium" versions to get people to subscribe

  8. 1

    This might be off topic (maybe a rant as well), but in my case I think one the biggest challenges is narrowing it down to which platform to use based on the budget I have (I'm trying to keep things $30-40 per month starting off). And the platform would determine what CI/CD pipeline I'd have. Something sort of a case-by-case analysis of building a service on a shoe-string budget would be interesting to read/watch.

    • With Heroku/Render/Netlify --> Would be simple to plug github with their pipelines and be done with it. And rather they take care of everything if you throw more money.
    • With something like using GCP/AWS free tier, it becomes difficult. I'd have to roll out a terraform/ansible script to manage all the infrastructure or worse manage it via their UI. Take care of CDN and other things and also the hidden costs that I've no idea how it will accrue (eg. The outgoing bandwidth costs is something that I don't understand very well shrugs).

    For easy, hassle free usage something like Heroku or Render would be great to use. But as it scales, the Heroku pricing gets ridiculous.

    Also, database costs a chunk of the budget (if you consider price-parity in Asian countries. $7 is maybe expensive for shared vCPU 512Mb RAM and 1Gb SSD).

    1. 2

      "(eg. The outgoing bandwidth costs is something that I don't understand very well shrugs)."

      You have no idea man, it's soooo expensive. I accidentally did an s3 transfer on petabytes of data on a friday and came into work on monday with a $150,000 AWS bill 🤣 ... and that's how I learned about egress fees

      I love the "narrowing down which platform(s) to use based on a budget". That might literally be the title of a video or blog post.

      1. 1

        Wow, $150,000 is insane. Did you pay or Did they ban you from AWS? One guy tweeted a few months back, on how he forgot to shut down an EC2 instance that led AWS to ban him from using their services.

        1. 1

          lol. I wish I could tell the full story. It's still ongoing unfortunately... one day though.

  9. 1

    Yeah, most people hate operations and configuration...we just want to work on coding features.

    1. 1

      Totally, I'm the same way but through a series of unfortunate events, found myself maintaining hundreds of servers that are supposed to have an uptime of 99.99%.

      So you think this would be valuable? Something like "listen, here's how you do this, here's the code...godspeed"?

      1. 1

        Maybe... It'll be a niche for sure.
        I think most people are interested in moving to the cloud to ease operations pain.

        1. 2

          This be some enterprise black magic vodoo speak.

          I think I'd rather lick a sidewalk than teach on prem to cloud migrations for cobolt programs... even though there's probably money there.

          And I'm totally cool with eating my words in 5 years if this works out :)

  10. 1

    I struggled mightily. I don’t know how a video could deal with specific issues that I was dealing with. Unless I found a video that ran the exact same set up as me. Code mentors, and about two hours helped me out

    1. 1

      This may not apply to you but isn’t stack overflow an example of a product that helps with the long tail of specific problems?

      I’m not saying this idea would have helped you but there’s hope!

      Also what’s the set up? Is it that uncommon?

      1. 1

        Stackoverflow did not have any of the answers that I needed.

        I was using Heroku + Postgres + NodeJS.

        Sometimes the task is too daunting to even ask the right questions.

        But, this might not be for me. Idk.

        1. 1

          oh interesting. Personally. I don't think that's an unusual set up at all. I think if you had some more foundational ops knowledge it wouldn't have been such a struggle. Thanks for your thoughts!

  11. 1

    I think there is great value to a devops edu platform, similar to egghead.io.

    You just have to keep in mind that, the platform is providing practical content that's applicable to real life scenarios. That will set it apart from others like acloudguru, linuxacademy and Udemy, who mainly focus on providing training for certifications.

    1. 1

      Excellent points. I’ll keep that in mind. And agree it will need to be extremely practical. No Bs.

      1. 1

        I'd be very interested in joining, if you're looking for someone to work with. I started a DevOps Engineer role 2 months ago, and have 3 years working experience in IT.

        1. 1

          Are you thinking on the content creation side or as a user of the service?

            1. 1

              Awesome. Let’s chat. I’m on Twitter @andrewpierno

              Or email me at Andrew at NoCo.io

  12. 1

    This seem very easy to validate: get some courses/material on YouTube and check for engagement, THEN build a site. You'll have an audience already, by then!

    1. 1

      That’s exactly how I was thinking of doing it!

  13. 1

    What does struggling with DevOps mean here? I'm asking, because there are plenty of resources that cover most cases from different angles.

    I had my own issues with moving one of my services from Heroku into a docker image to then be deployed to another service. I googled, read a lot of similar blog posts, asked Google Cloud Platform support, asked an AWS guy during an AMA at SUS, got some really misguided advice, had a short email back-and-forth with a open source developer who has popular repos in direct relation to my problem, announced this as my issue at several group sessions with other founders, posted in the Rust community forum and chat, and nothing helped. There was even somebody else who put a bounty on the SO post. Eventually, I figured it out on my own - not perfect - but it's running.

    That was my problem with DevOps.

    Moving a Postgres database from Heroku to GCP Cloud SQL without downtime was easy in comparison.

    I haven't seen one single course that has any significant relevance to things I do over the past way too many years. I don't need another Hello World for DevOps.

    1. 1

      I don't mean any of this directed at you personally. Generally speaking:

      • Why do people use heroku? Why does netlify/zeit/etc exist? Bc dev ops is complicated.
      • putting a rust binary into a docker container IS hello world for dev ops. aside from perhaps getting a service behind ssl.

      If you googled and found a 5 minute video that showed how to put your rust code into a docker image I bet you'd have watched it.

      The question I'm really asking is if there were a few other videos that went deeper AND there was a Dockerfile for you to just copy would you pay for that service?

      1. 1

        I expect these kind of things to be well-documented in official documentation. If I had a guarantee at that time that this 5 minute video will show me what I need to know, sure, I would have paid $x for it. However, it seems that the dev content industry that has emerged over the past few years swarms to the most mundane and at the same time shiny objects that are not the type of things that I personally end up working with.

        I don't know why people use Heroku. I had Postgres and my API hosted for a few months there and now I'm very happy that I'm not on Heroku any longer. It may be good for hobby projects and prototyping, but it's not suitable for my use-case anylonger.

        Netlify cannot figure out their overpriced and buggy analytics for months. They make it easy to push stuff into production though and that's why I use them right now. However, there are other solutions that are as easy - maybe not as cost-efficient though.

        Regarding your second bullet point, I don't think you understood the issue AT ALL.

        1. 1

          you need a service (rust in this case) on the internet... there's nothing new here... what am I missing?

  14. 1

    I think it's certainly possible to struggle with devops, but in 2020 it's not really necessary unless you have very specific needs. Tools like Serverless Framework and AWS Lambda + DynamoDB + API gateway let you get services up quickly with a few hours of work, and those services can handle a lot of users. There are sharp edges, but they aren't any worse than, for instance, dependecy management. We wrote a short article up on how we do it here: https://dev.to/uclusion/example-production-serverless-files-10fn

    1. 1

      You're probably like me in that you've overcome the hurdle of learning those tools, but I recall first hand how complicated AWS seemed to me initially (and in some cases when I'm doing something unusual, it's still complicated).

      Maybe I'll narrow the "ideal users" down to two groups.

      1. Newer Devs / Front end devs - The typical firebase user looking to go full stack.
      2. Pro Dev Ops people - new sh*t comes out all the time and they're expected to know it. They're highly paid and could probably get their companies to pay for it.
      1. 1

        Re newer devs. I can see that viewpoint, AWS does have a ton of ways to do the same thing. I'm not sure that's really a devops specific problem though. The backend as a whole has a fairly mature landscape and hence a lot of choices. A "well lighted path" session would be useful for them, encompasing the entirety of the backend side.

        For pro devops people, I think the format of egghead.io isn't really what they're after. I did devops things for a few years, and the most useful thing was clear docs, since even advanced cloud concepts have been around in the ops word for 20 years or so.

        1. 1

          I agree clear docs are all that's needed but often your stuck with whatever you're given.

          But new stuff comes out all the time... kubernetes comes to mind recently.

          1. 3

            OMG yes on the docs. One of my biggest pet peeves on with AWS. I swear, there's a startup in there to just sell subscriptions to readable docs.

            1. 1

              I actually love this idea! That’s genius. Everyone knows the pain of going through aws docs 🙌🏻🙌🏻

  15. 1

    I think this definitely the case after talking to 100s of Devs. Most want to focus on the code and not the underlying infrastructure. We built uffizzi.cloud specifically to answer this pain point. It has best DevOps practices built in and you can deploy in minutes. Would be happy to demo or explain further.

    1. 1

      nice pitch, but not really what I was looking for. I'm not struggling with dev ops. Was saying I noticed the problem too.

      Building a cloud hosting service is one way to solve the problem.

      Another way would be just educate people.

  16. 1

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

    1. 1

      🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

  17. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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