This post is a brainstorm of ideas on how to focus on the core technical problems and address solving supporting technical issues as efficiently as possible. Of course this makes some assumption of what is your "core problem", but I will assume this is a "typical consumer web / mobile app". If you're a devtool company such as Docker, for example, then your core domain and supporting domains may be completely different.
- Follow the mantra "borrow, buy, or build" (I may have re-ordered it)
- Ideally, there is a well-supported open source project that solves the problem that you can use. I think examples of this are Docker, Angular, Meteor, and so on. These are all very different technologies that but they all have in common that: 1) large, active communities around them (which means you will have support when you run into issues), 2) many examples of them used significantly in production, and 3) strong core teams behind the projects (in this case, each of them have a corporation backing them)
- Secondarily, if there's a commercial product or service that addresses your need, then strongly consider using it. This is a case where you may end up using Docker the open source project first, and then realize it's very useful to use something like Docker's registry for private repos.
- Lastly, there is building your own solution. Sometimes, this means using an open source project like Docker registry but hosting it on your own physical servers or even putting it on AWS. This last one is typically about either 1) saving money (since you don't have to pay the premium pricing for a ready-to-go solution by the official provider) or 2) maximizing flexibility (e.g. add additional features, being able to switch vendors, etc.)
- Use a managed service for storing persistent data
- Use one of the big 3 cloud service providers' (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure) proprietary solutions (e.g. Aurora for AWS). You will probably pick one of the 3 providers for the majority of your cloud services anyway:
- Potentially may be the most powerful solution since AWS can optimize the hardware, networking, specifically for that DB product. The biggest downside is vendor lock-in. If AWS becomes more expensive relative to others in the future, it may be difficult to switch.
- Use a smaller cloud service focused on DBaaS such as Compose.io (although it's now part of IBM) or Heroku's PostgresSQL service.
- Databases can take quite a bit of work to setup, maintain, backup, etc. It's also the least forgiving part of your tech stack - mistakes can sink a business here. What you're really paying for, IMO, is 1) convenience - so you don't need to hire a dedicated sysadmin, 2) maintenance & backups - doing routine patches, nightly backups, essentially all the maintenance tasks that ought to do but might not know or remember to do, and 3) someone to call if something goes deeply awry (this will usually cost the most in the form of an add-on enterprise support plan).
- Use a widely-used UI framework
- Wide usage is very important because that ensures most of those nasty browser incompatibility bugs gets caught by the community and not on your product.
- While many people worry about having a cookie-cutter theme (especially with Bootstrap), in practice if you customized the variables, e.g. font-faces, color scheme, base font size, etc., you can still have a unique UI look for your product.
- The most interesting UI library out there is Semantic UI which uses a natural language approach and focuses on making it very easy to customize your site by swapping / combining style guides / themes.
- Use a container management service
- Containers have moved from the point of hype and have seen widespread production usages in many companies. Since the early days of containers, there's been many approaches to managing them, from using basic shell scripts to using traditional configuration management tools (e.g. Chef, Puppet, etc) to powerful resource management frameworks like Mesos.
- The most popular open source project seems to be Kubernetes (backed by Google which provides Google Container Engine) which was based on a decade plus of experience using containers by Google (from their legacy system Borg).
- In theory, Kubernetes can be run on any cloud service, but I think Google Container Engine will provide the easiest setup (when I tried it a while ago, it was not trivial to setup in Azure, even with all the instructions).
- Amazon has their own Elastic Container Services, which I don't know too much about, but it's a proprietary solution so there's concerns about vendor lock-in. It seems like Kubernetes has support from virtually every significant cloud player except for Amazon.
- Use a container registry service
- If you do go the container route, you will need to store all the Docker images in a Docker registry. (The size of all the images can add up quite quickly if you want to keep old versions).
- Docker and Google offer paid services.
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Use an event tracking service
- Services like Mixpanel are incredibly useful and provide better reporting than most homegrown solutions.
- Use a monitoring / logging service
- New Relic has a proprietary solution that seems quite advanced (focuses on monitoring availability + performance) - it's pricey but there's a free tier.
- Many companies like to use ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) for monitoring.
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Use a CI / CD service
- The most established services in this space are Codeship, Circle CI, and Travis CI (which has mostly focused on open source projects and recently offered private project services).
- Shippable is a relatively new comer and focuses extensively on Docker / container-related capabilities. Their pricing also seems like the cheapest at $10/container.
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Use pager duty
- Not sure what's the next alternative to PagerDuty, but they do a great job of creating a straightforward application that does what it sounds like.
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Use a code repository service (e.g. GitHub)
Other services:
- Translation management service
- Visual diff - not aware of any services / well-supported open source project for this area
- Task management (Asana, Hansoft X)
- Cross browser / device testing (Sauce Labs)