Comment by czhu12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by czhu12 | Hacker News Reader

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This is why I built https://canine.sh -- to make installing all that stuff a single step. I was the cofounder of a small SaaS that was blowing >$500k / year on our cloud stack

Within the first few weeks, you'll realize you also need sentry, otherwise, errors in production just become digging through logs. Thats a +$40 / m cloud service.

Then you'll want something like datadog because someone is reporting somewhere that a page is taking 10 seconds to load, but you can't replicate it. +$300 / m cloud service.

Then, if you ever want to aggregate data into a dashboard to present to customers -- Looker / Tableau / Omni +$20k / year.

Data warehouse + replication? +$150k / year

This goes on and on and on. The holy grail is to be able to run ALL of these external services in your own infrastructure on a common platform with some level of maintainability.

Cloud Sentry -> Self Hosted Sentry

Datadog -> Self Hosted Prometheus / Grafana

Looker -> Self Hosted Metabase

Snowflake -> Self Hosted Clickhouse

ETL -> Self Hosted Airbyte

Most companies realize this eventually and thats why they eventually move to Kubernetes. I think its also why often indie hackers can't quite understand why the "complexity" of Kubernetes is necessary, and just having everything run on a single VPS isn't enough for everything.

This assumes you're building a SAAS with customers though. When I started my career it was common for companies to build their own apps for themselves, not for all companies to be split between SAAS builders and SAAS users.

I enjoy the flipside... working for a company that does provides SAAS, sometimes I find myself reminding people that we don't necessarily need a full multi-datacenter redundant deploy with logging and metrics and alerting and all this other modern stuff for a convenience service, used strictly internally, infrequently (but enough to be worth having), with effectively zero immediate consequences if it goes down for a bit.

You can take that too far, of course, and if you've got the procedures all set up you often might as well take them, but at the same time, you can blow a thousands and thousands of dollars really quickly to save yourself a minor inconvenience or two over the course of five years.

I'm also in this space - https://disco.cloud/ - similarly to you, we offer an open source alternative to Heroku.

As you well know, there are a lot of players and options (which is great!), including DHH's Kamal, Flightcontrol, SST, and others. Some are k8s based - Porter and Northflank, yours. Others, not.

Two discussion points: one, I think it's completely fair for an indie hacker, or a small startup (Heroku's and our main customers - presumably yours too), to go with some ~Docker-based, git-push-compatible deployment solution and be completely content. We used to run servers with nginx and apache on them without k8s. Not that much has changed.

Two, I also think that some of the needs you describe could be considered outside of the scope of "infra": a database + replication, etc. from Crunchy Bridge, AWS RDS, Neon, etc. - of course.

But tableau? And I'm not sure that I get what you mean by 150k/year - how much replication are we talking about? :-)

Yeah so happy to share how that happened to us.

If you want to host a redshift instance, and get Google Analytics logs + twilio logs + stripe payments + your application database into a datawarehouse, then graph all that in a centralized place (tableau / looker / etc)

A common way to do that is:

- Fivetran for data streaming

- Redshift for data warehousing

- Looker for dashboarding

You're looking at $150k / year easily.

Yeah, you are very right.

If you start peaking success, you realize that while your happy path may work for 70% of real cases, it's not really optimal to convert for most of them. Sentry helps a lot, you see session replay, you get excited.

You realize you can A/B test... but you need a tool for that...

Problem: Things like Openreplay will just crash and not restart themselves, with multiple container setups, some random part going down will just stop your session collection, without you noticing.. try to debug that? Goodluck, it'll take at least half a day. And often, you restore functionality, only to have another random error take it down a couple of months later, or you realize, the default configuration is only to keep 500mb of logs/recordings (what), etc, etc...

You realize you are saving $40/month for a very big hassle and worse, it may not work when you need it. You go back to sentry etc..

Does Canine change that?

Canine just makes deploying sentry / grafana / airbyte + 15k other OS packages a one click install, which then just gives you a URL you can use. Because its running on top of kubernetes, a well built package should have healthchecks which will detect an error and auto-restart the instance.

Obviously if [name your tool] is built so that it can be bricked [1], even after a restart, then you'll have to figure it out. Hopefully most services are more robust than that. But otherwise, Kubernetes takes care of the uptime for you.

[1] This happened with a travis CI instance we were running back in the day that set a Redis lock, then crashed, and refused to restart so long as the lock was set. No amount of restarts fixed that, it required manual intervention

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