<story><title>How We Automate Our Infrastructure</title><url>https://segment.com/blog/automating-our-infrastructure/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avitzurel</author><text>This seems to be the &amp;quot;new standard&amp;quot; when it comes to startup infrastructure beyond Heroku.&lt;p&gt;However, what frustrates me the most about it, is that every startup is left to figure out everything from scratch and it seems impossible.&lt;p&gt;There are many tools you need to familiarize yourself with, too many to be comfortable with.&lt;p&gt;Companies that already figured it out write blog post like this, which provide insights but it&amp;#x27;s super high level, as a startup engineer this gives you absolutely no value other than &amp;quot;yes, they are using it too&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there&amp;#x27;s a solution for this generic enough to open source that will be a good start for startups.&lt;p&gt;You check out the project, read some docs and in 2-3 hours you have a cluster running. Kind of a &amp;quot;batteries included&amp;quot; devops solution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hackercomplex</author><text>In my view what we&amp;#x27;re really talking about here is PaaS.  Every shop is left to implement a private PaaS on their own for the most part.  There are software companies out there who specialize in helping teams deploy this kind of architecture for example:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pivotal.io&amp;#x2F;platform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pivotal.io&amp;#x2F;platform&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;deis.io&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;deis.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;both are open source technologies based on Docker that are gathering momentum and you can hire consultants to help you deploy either one.&lt;p&gt;I personally don&amp;#x27;t use Docker.  The startup I&amp;#x27;m building has chosen to standardize on the JVM for all application code so we leverage the JAR file as a kind of container.  The Java ecosystem already solved the problem of zero-downtime deployments a long time ago so for us deploying can be as simple as shipping new jars file across the network.&lt;p&gt;Instead of using Docker to drive development we simply spin up development database&amp;#x2F;redis&amp;#x2F;etc instances in the cloud which automatically join a development VPN network.  All of the non-VPN interfaces are automatically firewalled off.  One nice advantage of this setup is that developers who have slow laptops are still able to work.  I&amp;#x27;m a big fan of this approach.&lt;p&gt;Check out Wildfly&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;High Availablity&amp;quot; features if you&amp;#x27;re interested in one way that the Java Ecosystem can make headaches like zero-downtime deployment, HTTP health checks, monitoring, caching, and even load balancing disappear.. It&amp;#x27;ll deploy non-java code too as long as it&amp;#x27;s on the JVM.  If you&amp;#x27;re a Scala only shop there are some great Scala-only alternatives available to boot.</text></comment>
<story><title>How We Automate Our Infrastructure</title><url>https://segment.com/blog/automating-our-infrastructure/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avitzurel</author><text>This seems to be the &amp;quot;new standard&amp;quot; when it comes to startup infrastructure beyond Heroku.&lt;p&gt;However, what frustrates me the most about it, is that every startup is left to figure out everything from scratch and it seems impossible.&lt;p&gt;There are many tools you need to familiarize yourself with, too many to be comfortable with.&lt;p&gt;Companies that already figured it out write blog post like this, which provide insights but it&amp;#x27;s super high level, as a startup engineer this gives you absolutely no value other than &amp;quot;yes, they are using it too&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there&amp;#x27;s a solution for this generic enough to open source that will be a good start for startups.&lt;p&gt;You check out the project, read some docs and in 2-3 hours you have a cluster running. Kind of a &amp;quot;batteries included&amp;quot; devops solution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brikis98</author><text>Trying to create battle-tested, pre-packaged, &amp;quot;batteries included&amp;quot; DevOps solutions is exactly what we&amp;#x27;re trying to do at Atomic Squirrel [1]. We think there needs to be a middle ground between Platform as a Service (PaaS), like Heroku, where everything is hidden and magical, and therefore, harder to debug, customize, scale, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), like AWS, where you have full power and flexibility, but also way too many moving parts to learn and manage for a small company. If your company needs something like this, contact us at info@atomic-squirrel.net.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.atomic-squirrel.net&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.atomic-squirrel.net&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>