Doing your own devops, once learned, does not take much time at all, I’ve been doing it since the late 1990’s and I can spin up a new server from scratch in minutes.
OvermindDL1
hassan
Doing your own devops, once learned, does not take much time at all, I’ve
been doing it since the late 1990’s and I can spin up a new server from
scratch in minutes.
That’s delightful but irrelevant. No matter how experienced you are,
building and maintaining infrastructure is still time taken from other
items on – for at least at most startups – a 110% full plate.
And when I started at Sun Microsystems in 1989, the first day was
“there’s your workstation, here’s a SCSI tape cartridge so you can
install an operating system on it” – so I’ve been doing this a while
as well.
It’s good to know how, and it’s good to have the option to delegate
when you have other higher-priority things to do.
IMO.
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brightball
It generally boils down to setup time.
This business analogy would be that you are looking at something close to a fixed time requirement that isn’t going to change much regardless of the size of your project or traffic level. If you’ve got a project where you are actively working, paying this cost is very low-investment and high reward. If you have a side project or are splitting time on multiple projects then it’s time you are spending not focused on the project itself.
If you’ve never done it before then the up front investment and uncertainty can also be a deterrent.
When you are looking at a language like Elixir where you are already coming into new language, environment, tooling, expansive clustering options and deployment options, OTP and the like…having one less thing to learn is a huge benefit.
It’s worth learning eventually, but it’s very understandable for people to want to have options that don’t require it up front.
In my case, I did PHP professionally for about 4 years before I signed up for a Slicehost account and started tinkering with my own server setup for personal stuff. About a year later I started running my own servers for everything and still rabbit holed down options for log management, monitoring, debugging, keeping things up to date, security patches, rotating SSL, managing user permissions, etc. Most of the reason that I got into that was because back in 06-07 you had to dive into server configure heavily to performance tune PHP.
It was a great experience for me to learn…but it was a lot of time and I’m still learning. Its not for everybody and services like Gigalixir and Heroku are invaluable in helping people bridge those gaps.
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OvermindDL1
My main issue with the instant-setup things is not even the instant-setup part or the lack of knowledge part (I really don’t think people should use something without knowing how it works, from their servers to their cars to how their house is standing), but rather the monstrous cost most of them are (look at aws or so, they could have hosted one of my last big sites for, oh, $30k/month minimum, where I hosted it on my own servers for <$200month with room to spare). My spending a few hours to set it up is worth it when I’m saving over $30k/month. ^.^
0
brightball
At the point where your costs would be that high, it’s also something that would factor into the formula.
Very similar to the rails thought process in terms of time to market being most important in most cases until you really start growing. You can always move. You can’t go back and start getting users sooner.
1
codecakes
codecakes
codecakes
I am using the older phoenix 1.2.x version and running an umbrella project.
during git push gigalixir master
Creating .profile.d with env vars
-----> Writing export for multi-buildpack support
=====> Downloading Buildpack: https://github.com/gjaldon/heroku-buildpack-phoenix-static
=====> Detected Framework: Phoenix
-----> Loading configuration and environment
Loading config...
WARNING: phoenix_static_buildpack.config wasn't found in the app
Using default config from Phoenix static buildpack
Detecting assets directory
WARNING: no package.json detected in root nor custom directory
* assuming phoenix 1.3.x and later, please check config file
Will use phoenix configuration:
* assets path assets
* mix tasks namespace phx
Will use the following versions:
* Node 6.9.2
Will export the following config vars:
* MIX_ENV=prod
no package.json detected in root nor custom directory ??
0
jesse
Hey @codecakes, I responded to you privately, but for anyone else interested, umbrella apps need a little extra configuration. See Moved — GIGALIXIR 1.4.0 documentation
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