Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?
Don&#x27;t:<p>- Manage your own DBs for production. I used to manage my own but now I use IaaS for it. It&#x27;s worth the extra cost even if your budget is low since it lowers your risk and lets you move faster. AWS Aurora is awesome but expensive. There&#x27;s a SaaS&#x2F;IaaS out there for most DBs. And they handle the backups!<p>- Use Kubernetes. k8s is awesome, I love it, but it is a beast and probably overkill for your solo ops team that is also multitasking.<p>- Manually SSH &#x2F; rsync &#x2F; scp directly onto prod.<p>Do:<p>- Version control (Git) everything<p>- Use containers where it makes sense (I use Docker when I&#x27;m not using Serverless). It keeps your dev and prod in sync and helps with immutable deployments (see later points)<p>- Use Infrastructure as Code<p>- Use Github actions to do your deploys<p>- Use immutable deployments. More time to setup but makes rollbacks easier and if you never hot patch production you can&#x27;t create a unique state that can&#x27;t be restored.<p>Finally, (and possibly controversially): use serverless where you can (I personally use AWS Lambda, S3, and Cloudfront).<p>My personal flow:<p>- All my infrastructure is in a parameterized CloudFormation template.<p>- The template is checked into Git with the service code.<p>- After CI runs the tests, CD builds my serverless functions and uploads the zip.<p>- Then it runs the cloudformation template.<p>The same flow also works for Docker except &quot;uploads the zip&quot; becomes &quot;pushes the container&quot;<p>Using this setup I can tear down and build up my setup in minutes, making it easy (and cheaper) to separate dev and production.