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Comment by sdevonoes | Hacker News Reader

I was expecting: PHP + MySQL + a bunch of shell scripts to install stuff on servers + reading logs via command line by ssh as root. Instead I found: Redis, Rabbitmq, DataDog, ES, React + Redux, Ansible, PagerDuty... I wouldn't call that "boring technology". Sure, you are not using Docker nor K8s... but still.

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I'm one guy with a 7-figure ARR business. My tech is Stripe, Apache, Ruby CGI and CSV. Literally my database is a CSV file.

Maybe that's too boring. But I spend about 10 hours a year maintaining it. The bulk of my devops this year was moving to Let's Encrypt.

Actually I find the CSV „db“ idea rather exciting. Too exciting for my taste!

Why not SQLite which is even more boring and comes with better guarantees?

My guess is that he does a lot of manual editing of entries which is fast in a text editor and somewhat annoying to form SQL statements to do.

There are lots of guis that make editing a sqlite db almost as easy as editing a spreadsheet.

Didn't know about that, thanks! Might use some in my own work.

A sqlite db is just a file. So at that level it is exactly like a spreadsheet. It's just a much more powerful storage format. But for the app opening it it can be presented much like a spreadsheet.

I do'nt need those guarantees. It's one more thing to upgrade. vi is my DB editor.

Honestly, at that point I'd rather use Excel / LibreCalc.

What’s your business?

His business is sidekiq[1] and Faktory...

[1] https://sidekiq.org/products/enterprise.html

[2] https://contribsys.com/faktory/

I'm currently reading logs via command line by ssh as you describe for a simple service and not satisfied with this. What would be a step up without a lot of extra infrastructure?

I’ve personally used Graylog[1] with success in the past. However, I’ve had an excellent time with Grafana and have been following their Loki[2] project. My company uses other solutions, so I haven’t needed it, but the Grafana stack might suit your use case.

[1] https://www.graylog.org/products/open-source [2] https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/

The question was: "What would be a step up [from ssh] without a lot of extra infrastructure?"

I think you just way overshot it.

My attempt at a simple step up would be mounting the logs with sshfs and using your favorite editor.

New Relic has a free tier, just install their agent (or another compatible logging agent).

Log forwarding to a single server running rsyslogd, and then view consolidated logs there.

Run vector [1] on each host to collect logs and send them to New Relic's free tier.

No need to manage extra infrastructure for logging, New Relic works pretty well and also has alerts, and Vector makes it easy to move to a new provider or self-hosted solution without reinstalling agents: just add a new sink to your config file.

[1] https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector

> PHP + MySQL + a bunch of shell scripts

That's a typical 2010-era stack.

We're almost in 2022, things have evolved.

It’s almost 2022 and 95% of all backends are still just CRUD.

As opposed to what? Talking 1-100 person orgs.

backend being the key word. Just CRUD but with React front ends that do not a lot more than before.

Meh, my stack is laravel hosted on docker containers.

PHP, Redis, MariaDB and a makefile to run docker-compose commands.

Nothing wrong with it tbh, it runs on a VPS

> That's a typical 2010-era stack.

>> PHP, MariaDB, Makefile

> We're almost in 2022, things have evolved.

>> laravel , Redis, run docker-compose commands

Fix that for ya

Except PHP + MySQL is still a solid choice for a single developer. It scales out well enough for almost all use cases.

Has worked brilliantly well for me for many years.

There are more maintainable options available that are just as free, easy to get started, and have large communities.

PHP has evolved, it less of an injection vulnerability factory now, and MariaDB is the new MySQL. As usual computers became cheaper and more powerful, maybe not as much as we could have hoped in 2010 but SSDs made up for the slow rate of progress in CPUs.

All that to say that PHP + MySQL/MariaDB has evolved will get you much further than it did in 2010 without losing its simplicity. Current trends are backed by tech giants working with millions of servers and billions of users, and they push for technologies that fit their use cases. They goal is not to make a one man shop.

exactly what i thought.

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