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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I think that's a fine analysis. I don't think Caddy cares that it's not the "right way" if it solves problems for some people. It is certainly easier than certbot and nginx for cases where you have one VM that you play with as though it's a pet. And a lot of people treat their production environments that way, so it does solve a problem.

The next problem that people will run into is that because they can't reliably run multiple "things", they won't have a monitoring stack to tell them that certs aren't renewing. But, maybe nothing bad will happen and it won't be a problem. "Hope is not a strategy" if you're a Google SRE, but people do pretty OK with hope in the real world ;)

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> The next problem that people will run into is that because they can't reliably run multiple "things", they won't have a monitoring stack to tell them that certs aren't renewing. But, maybe nothing bad will happen and it won't be a problem. "Hope is not a strategy" if you're a Google SRE, but people do pretty OK with hope in the real world ;)

Sort of agreed with this.

Based on my experience, the reality is a bit more complicated. As soon as one is past the "this VM is a special pet and it is the only one I have" stage in my experience even smaller companies get dozens and soon hundreds of distinct HTTPs entry points:

* Main site/API ( code )

* Ops support

* bizops ( invoicing/quoting )

Which is where the issues of monitoring and observability come up.

I bet techcrunch has close to a hundred HTTP/HTTPS entry points and every time they evaluate a solution to replace their current entry point structure they ask if the new method would at least solve all of their existing problems. Ops people aren't gong to add another partial solution so the mix.

> I bet techcrunch has close to a hundred HTTP/HTTPS entry points

I wouldn't be so sure about that. It's certainly possible that's the case but equally I've personally seen new sites on Techcrunch's scale literally served from a couple of a couple of boxes running Wordpress (I kid you not!) which sits behind a few more boxes running pretty aggressive Varnish profiles and then that is sat behind Akamai's CDN. Most of the content on news sites is static and highly cache-able so there isn't always the need to go down the micro-services route.

I think you are thinking strictly about an origin for techcrunch.com and excluding all the other services that spring up internally to run any reasonably sized property.

For example, does it run RabbitMQ anywhere? Rabbitmq admin front-end is HTTP. Same goes for Kafka and other applications and we aren't even touching bizops.

I'm not going to argue that you're wrong nor that I have much experience of Techcrunch aside the odd link posted on here but it's worth noting that you don't actually need all of that stuff and thus many online new sites don't. Plus sometimes those other resources might be managed by other teams where they follow different deployment models / best practices / etc than those who manage the public news site (team responsibilities are often messy and illogical)

My point isn't to say you're wrong, just that there will be as many exceptions to your point as there are occasions it's accurate.

> The next problem that people will run into is that because they can't reliably run multiple "things", they won't have a monitoring stack to tell them that certs aren't renewing.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure I follow; there's nothing preventing people from using something like https://ohdear.app/ (or any other monitoring tool) with a self-contained solution like Caddy. In fact, I recommend that people do.

No, something like that is fine. I am just trying to convey that there is a huge industry around fixing these problems very incrementally. ohdear.app today, then DataDog... all because they can't just run Prometheus and Alertmanager.

This isn't how I like it, but I totally see the use case. Caddy is a part of that use case and is probably the reason it exists. I think that's fine!

(Edit: ohdear is really neat though, I think people might want that no matter what. You have to serve your status page from somewhere, might as well get some cert checks thrown in for free!)

Just to clarify, Caddy v1 exports metrics to Prometheus. V2 could easily do the same, it's just as extensible as v1.

https://caddyserver.com/v1/docs/http.prometheus

I am not talking about Caddy, I'm talking about the thought process that leads to needing everything integrated in one process.

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