I run a small startup. We use a monolith and docker and no kubernetes. The tech team is me and two young software engineers. I.e. I'm the only experienced person in the team. My engineers are super productive though and quick learners.
The thing is that with a small team, you need to focus your engineering efforts on things that add values, i.e. mostly functional improvements of your product. Everything else is a distraction. Anytime we hit a problem everything grinds to a halt until we fix the problem.
Non value adding activities like devops are things that we do on a need to have basis. I have used things like teraform in the past but I opted not to on this product. Reason: I'm not planning to take down my servers and recreate them. And when I do that anyway, it takes about half an hour. Not worth spending days/weeks automating. There's a reason companies employ full time devops engineers, it's actually a lot of work. I do most of the devops in my team. When I have time and when it adds value. Which is not often. I do it well and I keep it simple.
We deploy multiple times per day though; that's worth automating. Automating things you only do once just isn't. We might get around to getting some automation for setting up our infrastructure eventually. But it doesn't really solve a problem I have right now.
Like instagram, we can scale if we have to. We're in google cloud and we use a load balancer and a scaling group of simple vms that run the docker container. One nice thing in Google cloud is that you can create a vm and parametrize it with the docker container image and it will run it. No need to install anything. The default os on the vm is docker ready. So, that's one less thing for me to worry about: installing shit on vms and making sure that is updated. I simply build my docker containers, push them to the registry and tell the scaling group to apply a new instance template with the new container. It does the rolling restart. That's just 2 simple gcloud commands in a Github action.
Simple is essential. Easy to understand. Easy to fix when it misbehaves. Easy to explain to others. Simple ensures you don't waste time.
> One nice thing in Google cloud is that you can create a vm and parametrize it with the docker container image and it will run it. No need to install anything.
The thing is that with a small team, you need to focus your engineering efforts on things that add values, i.e. mostly functional improvements of your product. Everything else is a distraction. Anytime we hit a problem everything grinds to a halt until we fix the problem.
Non value adding activities like devops are things that we do on a need to have basis. I have used things like teraform in the past but I opted not to on this product. Reason: I'm not planning to take down my servers and recreate them. And when I do that anyway, it takes about half an hour. Not worth spending days/weeks automating. There's a reason companies employ full time devops engineers, it's actually a lot of work. I do most of the devops in my team. When I have time and when it adds value. Which is not often. I do it well and I keep it simple.
We deploy multiple times per day though; that's worth automating. Automating things you only do once just isn't. We might get around to getting some automation for setting up our infrastructure eventually. But it doesn't really solve a problem I have right now.
Like instagram, we can scale if we have to. We're in google cloud and we use a load balancer and a scaling group of simple vms that run the docker container. One nice thing in Google cloud is that you can create a vm and parametrize it with the docker container image and it will run it. No need to install anything. The default os on the vm is docker ready. So, that's one less thing for me to worry about: installing shit on vms and making sure that is updated. I simply build my docker containers, push them to the registry and tell the scaling group to apply a new instance template with the new container. It does the rolling restart. That's just 2 simple gcloud commands in a Github action.
Simple is essential. Easy to understand. Easy to fix when it misbehaves. Easy to explain to others. Simple ensures you don't waste time.