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Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by bingohbangoh on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @11:47AM (#28841180)
Heroku is by far the best for this but just to throw in some alternatives:

  * Digital Ocean Apps -- somewhat finicky but works very similar to Heroku, it gets closer to bare metal so I prefer it
  * render.com
  * AWS Elastic Beanstalk -- though setting this up is non-trivial, it is very similar to Heroku with its "set it and forget it"
  * AWS Container Services -- if you're using Docker
  * Google App Engine
  * Supabase -- geared for SPAs but this may be the ticket depending on what you're building, is open source

You may want to use your own VPS but spend for a managed database solution as this has the most potential for catastrophe.
Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by jon-wood on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @11:53AM (#28841252)
I would advise against Elastic Beanstalk, last time I used it the product had the stink of being on life support - they've not really added any new features to it in several years, and even before that it was incredibly flakey.
Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by mleonhard on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @09:21PM (#28847155)
A concur. I got burned three times by Elastic Beanstalk in 2019 before switching away.

1. Their server manager process got in an unresponsive state. It wouldn't update my service. It stopped reporting logs from the service that was running. I went to the AWS Loft and consulted with the AWS Support technician. They had me log into the machine with SSH and troubleshoot. I was using Elastic Beanstalk specifically so I would not have to log into machines.

2. The console frequently showed servers as running when they weren't. And vice-versa. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why my server didn't start when it actually did start and why my server isn't listening on its port when the console incorrectly showed that it started. Logs were also delayed randomly.

3. The final straw happened on a Saturday. Elastic Beanstalk suddenly started returning errors. I purchased an AWS Support subscription and filed a ticket. It turns out Elastic Beanstalk Team had deployed on a Saturday and then rolled back. Unfortunately, anyone who did API calls through the new API version got new values added to their Elastic Beanstalk API backing database. The rolled-back the server errored when it saw the new values. They refused to just fix the bad data in their database caused by their bad deployment. Instead, they asked me (their customer) to download special management tools and perform manual operations to fix it. And I had to pay them to find out these instructions.

Now I use Heroku.

Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by dougbarrett on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @01:06PM (#28842195)
What additional features are you looking for? I've been using beanstalk for the past few years, and just wrapped up doing a large deployment on it. I've never found beanstalk to be a bottleneck or not have a feature I was looking for.
Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by pawelkomarnicki on Friday October 15, 2021 @07:36AM (#28876671)
Recently Beanstalk got upgraded to their "Amazon Linux 2" making it basically pretty much a Heroku clone, you even set up Procfile and services ;-) It still requires a LOT of hacking and insider-knowledge to do some funkier things, but it's a great thing
Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by pirate787 on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @01:35PM (#28842555)
I use Elastic Beanstalk daily it is maintained and supports everything on AWS, they've added ALB and WAP for example. It runs on Cloud Formation. Never experienced anything "flakey"
Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by fulafel on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @11:50AM (#28841211)
Also AWS Copilot if you like CLI based tooling, similar to Elastic Beanstalk but easier (at least if you're comfortable making a Dockerfile)
Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by bingohbangoh on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @12:26PM (#28841635)
Was not aware of Copilot! Looks much better than Elastic Beanstalk
Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by daveidol on Monday October 18, 2021 @04:46PM (#28911485)
Have you ever tried CapRover? https://caprover.com/

Would be curious how it compares to some of these.

Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by abnerg on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @09:58PM (#28847376)
Add TinyStacks to this list. They are just getting going, but I got a demo recently - sort of a cross between Vercel and Heroku, but on AWS.
Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by crummy on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @02:21PM (#28843179)
Fly.io is a pretty nice alternative too.
Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by jtsiskin on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @04:39AM (#28849739)
ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR when trying to connect
Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by cutemonster on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @06:40PM (#28858486)
Works now for me (https://fly.io)

Looks interesting

Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by iamcreasy on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @10:20PM (#28847498)
Does SPA stand for Single Page Application?
Re:Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time? by cutemonster on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @06:46PM (#28858529)
I think so. You'd use it as the backend for your SPA:

> Create a backend

But you'd probably host your SPA elsewhere, eg Vercel, Netlify, GitHub pages