Ask HN: How do I deploy my product? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I deploy my product?

8 pointsakisej3 comments

Have been deploying SaaS sandboxes so far, now doing a first deploy of our product to a prospect's private cloud due to security constraints,

1. What's the best way to deploy to a customer's private cloud? AWS AMI, Docker artifactory? 2. How do I license my product? Setting up a license server seems overkill, not sure if there's something easier.

This should be "solved", yet the internet doesn't seem to have good resources for startups getting started on this path. Thanks!

View on HN

Many clients have set up VMs for us in their infrastructure years ago, when we did on-premises. We'd access them through their VPN and deploy, upgrade, and maintain.

The license aspect was taken care of in the contracts (mid six-figure range) we had with them. Bear in mind these were bespoke, turn-key, data products where we'd be with the client to define their problem, decide if machine learning would be useful, interface with their systems to get data, build models, and build an application for their people with all the bells and whistles. From vague problem, to data, to ML models, to "The JavaScript".

I've been looking at https://www.replicated.com and KOTS, Kubernetes Off-The-Shelf Software, https://kots.io recently. There's too little documentation or material about how it all works.

Here's a video where they show an installation of Sentry, with a license upload: https://youtu.be/pQX6AbuI2ME

Additional resource: https://www.enterpriseready.io

I am pretty sure the founder of this: https://keygen.sh/ is on YC or Indie Hackers?

Might solve your license needs.

Otherwise, it depends on a lot of things so it's always a really hard question to answer. Some questions that immediately come to mind: Are you going to need to update frequently? Can they set you up an EC2 instance and give you SSH access, or do you need to do everything? What's the access pattern generally? Can the environment hit the internet? What's the tech stack, and are there multiple services to deploy?

I'd argue that whatever you end up doing, you should attempt to automate if you have the time. In this case, using Terraform and/or Ansible. That way, you have a repeatable process and can iterate on it using source control.

I'm just a bit biased (I work for Replicated), but yeah, this is exactly what Replicated does.

https://www.replicated.com/

I don't want to get all salesy here, but I'm happy to answer any questions you have, or connect you with folks for a demo, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com