Infra people in small companies, what does your infra look like?

Question

Hi all !I'm just wondering how an infra would look like in a small company, with 1 person dedicated to the infra, and around 10 devs working on a monolith.I'm guessing that a lot of people will have a lot of different opinions. Just how many possibilities could we see there ? And how would those impact the business and the devs job ?

colomofo · Accepted Answer

I've built infra for a lot of different orgs over a long period of time. My recommendation is that unless (and until) you're building for scale, you Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS).
Use an IaC system (Terraform, Pulumi, etc) to manage everything from Day 1:
1. Use a major cloud provider (AWS or GCP, probably)
2. Get a managed HTTP load balancer (ELB, ALB, whatever)
3. Package your app in a container image, and run your app on 3+ containers behind the load balancer (using on bare VMs, K8S, whatever you prefer), ideally at least 2x containers in 2x AZs.
4. Set up a managed database cluster with Postgres or MySQL and run it with multi-AZ and failover
5. Run 2x VM instances (for redundancy) for asynchronous jobs (using a message bus service or using your database as a work queue), ideally 1x in each of the AZs your database is in
6. Store any large files in cloud storage and put them behind a CDN
That's all 99% of companies will ever need to do. These are all old technologies that Just Work.

alxmng · Answer

A $40/mo VPS. Caddy web server. Supervisor to restart automatically. Git to deploy. CI using GitHub actions which build, run tests, and push to server on success. Automatic VPS snapshots and a cronjob to backup the DB to cloud storage. DB runs on the same box.This has worked for years with practically zero maintenance.

iamflimflam1 · Answer

Often what you end up will have been driven by the founder CTO or first technical hire. And it will be whatever they had most familiarity/experience with.
For a monolith and size you are talking about a sensible approach would be pretty minimal infra. The app would be hosted on a managed service (e.g cloud run, elastic beanstalk, app engine etc…) along with some kind of managed database service.
You might also see a kubernetes cluster being used - generally happens if that’s what the original devs knew.
Adventurous places may have the monolith deployed on serverless which can be pretty cost effective.
Heroku like services are also still popular.
In my previous place we had the monolith on cloud run.
Anything more complex than the above would to me be a bad smell - unless there were some very good reasons.

aprdm · Answer

Digital ocean with NGINX in a VM, web app in another and Postgres in another... will take you very far, just take backups and deploy all with ansible

dyeje · Answer

With 10 devs on a monolith, I probably wouldn&rsquo;t dedicate anyone to infra. Use a PaaS like Render or Aptible, focus on shipping product.

jamarty2 · Answer

The cheapest.In our case that&rsquo;s a rack in a datacenter, a SAN, MAAS, VMs, terraform, and chef.

comprev · Answer

As simple as possible, provisioned via IaC, and backed up with clear documentation.Your replacement will thank you, and so will management for a smooth transition.

Infra people in small companies, what does your infra look like?

Digital ocean with NGINX in a VM, web app in another and Postgres in another... will take you very far, just take backups and deploy all with ansible

With 10 devs on a monolith, I probably wouldn’t dedicate anyone to infra. Use a PaaS like Render or Aptible, focus on shipping product.

The cheapest.
In our case that’s a rack in a datacenter, a SAN, MAAS, VMs, terraform, and chef.

As simple as possible, provisioned via IaC, and backed up with clear documentation.
Your replacement will thank you, and so will management for a smooth transition.