Hi, I'm Evan. I built Thankful to automate customer service for millions of people, which Gladly acquired in 2023. Since then I started ParaVocê in the of...
There's many ways to provision a Linux VM. I'm going to show you my approach, which as usual, is aimed at keeping it as simple as possible. 1 I use Ansible to provision servers. It isn't perfect (it's a huge tool, it's slow, and it uses YAML), but it's the most reliable approach I've found for this task. The nice advantage to Ansible over running a shell script is all the steps ("tasks" in Ansible…
This post describes my lessons learned after 10 years running production environments in sizes ranging from "just getting started" to a "Series F" company with 4-9 SLAs. Like any good developer, I'm impatient and expect tasks to be fast, especially if I need to do them often, like deploying. Nothing is worse than hitting "deploy" and having a 10-15 minute delay before I can validate my changes.…
You're going to have outages in production. They're inevitable. The question is how to best minimize outages, both their frequency and duration. Common wisdom advocates for using managed k8s and databases, containerized services, horizontal scaling for redundancy, building images in CI/CD, and defining your infrastructure as code. This is Best Practice™, and no one was ever fired for doing that.…