Ask HN: How did you learn enough dev-ops to deploy portfolio apps?

4 points·nstoddar··2 comments

Hey Hacker News! I am a self-taught engineer and who has hit a bit of a road block. I can't deploy my demo apps to services like Digital Ocean, G Cloud, etc. I have had success with Modulus and Heroku but am wondering how other developers learned to deploy their applications without getting caught in too many rabbit holes (e.g. automated deployment, security, load balancing, etc.)

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>>> I can't deploy my demo apps to services like Digital Ocean, G Cloud, etc

Why?

Personally, for all my demo apps, I have a couple light (T2 Micro which qualify for the free tier) AWS instances lying around, on which I run applications on a random port, and then specifically open up only that port for the external world. So I end up with a pretty ugly looking url (http://ec2-123-234-123-234.ec2.aws.amazon.com:1337), which can be put behind a nice looking route53 entry if needed, and horizontally scaled by popping an ELB in front of it (for say a HN release).

For automated deployments, jenkins is usually my one stop shop, since all I need to do is configure a new job and trigger (usually github pushes) to build, test, deploy and restart my service.

It's one time effort, but really helpful in the long run I feel, especially if you have multiple demo apps over time.

1. Do it by hand. write everything down. 2. Turn this into shell (or python, ruby, your favorite) scripts, with variables. 3. Recognize the difficult areas -- configuring load balancers, etc. Conceptualize a general solution. 4. Find this solution in a CM of your choice -- solving the hardest problems first as a measure of fit.

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