[HN Gopher] Show HN: SetOps - Run containers, databases and more...
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       Show HN: SetOps - Run containers, databases and more in your own
       AWS account
        
       Author : latebird22
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2022-06-07 14:19 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.setops.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.setops.co)
        
       | oakct wrote:
       | Nice project! Just a note of feedback: for a service that
       | advertises with transparently deploying resources to my own AWS
       | account, it is surprisingly difficult to find out to what AWS
       | services the various concepts in setopts maps to. Given that I
       | would be the one paying for any mishaps and overprovisioned
       | resources, it would be good to have a reference for this. Maybe I
       | missed it?
        
         | latebird22 wrote:
         | Thank you so much for your feedback. You are not mistaken - it
         | looks like our documentation is currently lacking some of these
         | details. We are going to improve on that within the next days.
         | 
         | I can share a slide of one of our presentations right now which
         | roughly shows the inner workings of SetOps in your AWS account:
         | https://static-media.setops.co/infra/aws-components.png
        
       | melony wrote:
       | Crowded space! Flightcontroller, qovery, Architect. Competition
       | is stiff, I am interested to see where your product is heading.
        
       | tobi_tobsen wrote:
       | Hey HN! I'm Tobi, Co-Founder of SetOps.
       | 
       | Heroku is awesome; I started my dev career with it as well. But
       | for us, a digital agency, it didn't scale very well, mainly
       | price-wise. AWS solved the pricing issue but made our dev teams
       | slow since they did not know the in-and-outs of AWS and therefore
       | relied on the DevOps team, which became a bottleneck for new
       | projects.
       | 
       | During this time, the idea of SetOps was born. We imagined a tool
       | that empowers developers to run their applications in the cloud
       | to ship apps faster. But it needed to be flexible enough to
       | fulfill all our customer's requirements. So our key target group
       | is Devs & DevOps alike. By providing a web interface, CLI and
       | API, it can be used by devs and automated CI/CD systems.
       | 
       | Unlike other players like Heroku with SetOps users deploy to your
       | own AWS account - keeping ownership and control of their
       | infrastructure, allowing them to leave SetOps as they please and
       | profit from AWS saving plans which might save a lot of money.
       | 
       | Two important topics to us are reliability and cost-efficiency.
       | By using AWS ECS, managed load balancers, autoscaled EC2
       | instances, and redundancy across data centers, the infrastructure
       | and, therefore, the deployed applications are highly available
       | and self-healing. By sharing resources as much as possible - like
       | one load balancer for multiple apps and shared database instances
       | - SetOps can save some additional bucks.
       | 
       | If there is a use-case that SetOps does not support, it can be
       | extended by additional AWS resources and external cloud services
       | like MongoDB Atlas via VPC peering. Also, a reason to deploy to
       | one's own cloud account.
       | 
       | Although user-facing SetOps is currently an imperative
       | infrastructure tooling, under the hood, we use a JSON definition
       | of a so-called stage (a collection of apps and services) which we
       | pass to Terraform to ensure that the state in the cloud account
       | always matches the desired state. This allows for fixing broken
       | AWS configurations as well.
       | 
       | Long story short: if SetOps sounds interesting, check out
       | setops.co. We are looking forward to your feedback and use-cases.
        
       | superb-owl wrote:
       | > Isn't it just Kubernetes under the hood? That's not the right
       | question...Kubernetes is just one of the building blocks for easy
       | and secure app deployment. It is not a one-shot answer for day
       | two operations such as reliable databases, load balancing,
       | backups, certificates, and data security...With SetOps, you don't
       | need to care how we run containers - you'll profit from the
       | sensible choices and long hours our infrastructure experts spent
       | to make sure it runs well.
       | 
       | I have really mixed feelings about this response.
       | 
       | On the one hand, I 100% agree - vanilla k8s is not prod-ready,
       | and you need to do a _lot_ of work to figure out some things,
       | especially around persistent storage (but load balancing and
       | certs are a pretty solved problem).
       | 
       | But the line "you don't need to care how we run containers" bugs
       | me. Maybe your two-person start up doesn't need to know, but
       | eventually you will grow to the point that you _do_ need to care
       | how things are running, and need control over it. This is why so
       | many companies end up outgrowing Heroku and have to go through an
       | expensive migration.
       | 
       | What I'd love to see is a "batteries-included Kubernetes", which
       | allows me to slowly take control over more and more of the stack,
       | until I'm a 1000 person company and ready to run my own clusters.
        
         | lukeramsden wrote:
         | This also makes sense as somebody who has never deployed to or
         | operated k8s - I want the most prod-ready and batteries-
         | included cluster config, which I deploy myself on my own infra,
         | and can then customise as and when I need to, and learn as I
         | go.
        
         | _whiteCaps_ wrote:
         | Have you seen https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-for-k8s?
        
           | latebird22 wrote:
           | My experience with tools like these on Kubernetes, even with
           | something stable and widely used as e.g. certmanager, is that
           | in the end something still breaks and you still need to get
           | familiar with all the building blocks. In comparison if you
           | use managed services like the AWS Certificates service you
           | have less friction and less risk for something to break.
        
         | latebird22 wrote:
         | Interesting thought. I can see your case for some growing
         | companies. However I'm not sure if you would always need
         | Kubernetes for this. What would you like adjust when we grow
         | into a 1000 person company? I think you have still similar
         | requirements like autoscaling, resource allocation, zero-
         | downtime deployments etc. This is also possible without direct
         | access to the container management.
         | 
         | And there are a lot of companies which do not become the next
         | Unicorn and need an easy way to manage their container
         | workloads.
         | 
         | SetOps currently uses ECS since it comes with no additional
         | overhead costs for the management plane/API and does the
         | container management job well enough. However this is not a
         | definite decision and ECS could be replaced in the future. The
         | main point is that there is a simple abstraction for users
         | managing the workloads and that the "backend" is
         | interchangeable.
        
           | superb-owl wrote:
           | Here's a few examples of policies/needs that I've seen
           | companies run up against at scale. K8s does a great job
           | solving them.
           | 
           | * Understanding which workloads share a node's memory/CPU,
           | and isolating certain workloads for security reasons
           | 
           | * Running specific workloads on specific instance types (e.g.
           | with GPU or extra CPU)
           | 
           | * Configuring network policy between workloads
           | 
           | * Airgapping certain workloads
           | 
           | * Setting priority levels for different workloads, so some
           | scale more rapidly while others have to wait for a new node
           | to be provisioned
           | 
           | * Customized scaling behavior (e.g. based on the depth of a
           | queue or latency metrics)
           | 
           | * Multi-region support for DR
           | 
           | I could probably go on :)
        
             | latebird22 wrote:
             | You are totally right. For these specific use cases you
             | probably want full control. :) I guess if you have these
             | requirements a tool like SetOps, which simplifies the
             | management, might not be the right fit then.
             | 
             | Although some of these requirement, like running specific
             | workloads on specific instance types, could easily be
             | implemented.
        
       | codegeek wrote:
       | I donno. I am looking for a simpler solution on top of AWS that
       | abstracts away setting up the services with configuration but
       | doesn't necessarily use containers for everything and def. not
       | Kubernetes.
       | 
       | Is this not desirable for others ? All the solutions that I see
       | are focussed on containerizing (I get that to an extent). But I
       | would personally want a service on top of AWS that abstracts away
       | setting up EC2, load balancers, auto scaling, RDS etc etc. Does
       | it have to be kubernetes ?
        
         | latebird22 wrote:
         | That's exactly the idea with SetOps: using all these components
         | under the hood but abstracting it for the user with a much
         | simpler management. You could give it a try in the demo
         | environment if you like.
        
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       (page generated 2022-06-07 23:01 UTC)