How much percentage of your time is spent in devops?
For all the startup founders/developers out there, I wanted to ask, how much percentage of your time is spent in devops (including compliance tasks like GDPR) vs new feature development ? Does hosting your solution on AWS/Azure/GCP actually give you the freedom to spend your time working on building your business without having to worry day to day on issues like service availability/security upgrades etc ?
Almost no time because Heroku is so great and handles all of this for me.
This. Similar to Heroku, I use Render and don't even think about devops after less than a few hours of initial setup.
+1 for Render. I used to manage everything myself. DO droplet and CI pipeline to swarm deployment. It was a pain in the butt and render just makes life a breeze.
+1 for Heroku - saves a ton of time.
Also a happy Heroku user here, but I have to admit that the whole GDPR thing has taken up way too much of my time.
Exactly this. I use Vercel + Heroku and spend no time on devops at all.
Same here but Piku so it's self hosted. Git push deploys are the bomb!
Hey hey ! I don't consider myself as a founders but I quitted my job 2 months ago to try to develop an idea on my own full time.
As a developer I was thinking to reproduce what I always did at each of my jobs before, using big cloud provider to setup an full CI/CD process to push
prototypes. I consider myself expert on Azure (7 years on it) and noob on AWS and GCP.
It turns out I tried to setup something on those 3, and finally I switched back to something way more basic : GitHub + Netlify. The main reasons is simplicity and cost. The free tier on Netlify is enough for what I have to do/test (other small provider have good free tier too).
The only cons I have with solution like Netlify is minimum to none support at a good price (let alone free) to asp.net based back-end. So to answer you initial question : I spend 3-4 days looking for and set setup up something.
If your are interested in my xp within a company (when I worked for companies), ask me !
I use Microsoft Azure. Almost 0 time used on devops. There's some time setting it up. There's some time when I push a completely new build using new framework. I can even setup Azure Devops CICD.
I've used Heroku and it's great, but it's a fancy CI Pipeline and expensive server.
My setup for inboxes.app is code to Github -> Github Actions builds the binary -> GH Actions SCP's the binary to the server, then does a quick restart. I admit, it has maybe a second or so of downtime, but for MVP it's more than sufficient an requires no devops what so ever. At some point I'll likely make it hot-swap so there's zero downtime, but it's not an issue just yet.
Managing Nginx, Go and Mongo on a bare metal server is a breeze and once its set up that's it. They all scale incredibly well, they're all battle tested and I've had zero issues with it.
As for GDPR: I'm keeping everything within Europe (db/servers), the EU has high standards and even if you don't work within the scope of GDPR you should hold yourself to high standards.
I use AWS elastic beanstalk with AWS code pipeline, it was a bit of work at the beginning but after that it is very smooth pushing updates. AWS has a 12 months free tier which essentially makes it free at the beginning.
Same as @cbartlett said - Heroku. I designed, architected, and deployed (along with my team) the production environment for Symantec on AWS in 2016, and the production environment for PayPal on GCP in 2018...but when I started my own company, I used Heroku ( which is PaaS on top of AWS owned by Salesforce). If you want to minimize DevOps work, it is the clear choice in my opinion. My personal experience with GDPR on clouds is that it is dependent on design choices I make for the services I use. For example, I must tell S3 to keep EU data local or not to store certain data etc.