Hi everyone! I'm currently a third-year computer science student working at a startup where I handle both full-stack and DevOps responsibilities. We're in the process of developing a rental e-commerce platform, and I'm excited to share that about 50-60% of our production-grade code is ready for deployment. However, I would like to get some solid advice—not just on the tools, but also on strategies, potential pitfalls, and real-world experiences from all of you.
Here's a rundown of our current setup:
- **Infrastructure:** DigitalOcean for servers, S3 for object storage, and CloudFront as our CDN.
- **Orchestration:** We're currently using Docker Swarm but I'm open to suggestions.
- **Monitoring:** We plan to use Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana.
Here are a few specific questions I have:
1. What's the best zero-downtime strategy for small teams? Should we consider blue-green deployments, canary releases, or rolling updates?
2. What potential issues should I be aware of when using Docker Swarm in production?
3. How can we effectively handle sudden spikes in traffic?
4. What common runtime errors should we prepare for?
5. What critical alerts should we set up for a rental platform?
6. How should we approach backup and failure strategies for Postgres, MongoDB, and Redis?
7. Any general security tips you could share?
Feel free to share your personal experiences if they might help us out. Thanks a lot!
1 Answer
One big piece of advice is to avoid optimizing too early. With only 50-60% completed, the real-world performance might differ significantly from what you expect. Make sure you have a clear architecture map and design documents so everyone knows where everything fits together, especially if you need to migrate later. By the way, have you explored alternatives to Docker Swarm like Kubernetes?
I really appreciate your insight! I haven't made any documentation yet, so I could use some tips there. What do you mean by evaluate Kubernetes? Is it mainly a cost thing, or do you have suggestions on how to implement it?