As a one-man team operating a 10+ year old SaaS product, I’ve done two things that have helped keep things sustainable. The frontend continues to be server generated. PJAX style partial page updates is (mostly) dynamic enough. The maintenance burden of operating a JavaScript frontend is too high to justify for a 1-2 person team.
The second thing I’ve done is avoid containers. VMs work fine for many types of applications. That’s especially true if provisioning and configuration is mostly automated. A product like Google Cloud Run looks interesting for a few low-volume backend services that I operate. Containers are a good fit there because it simplifies operations rather than increases complexity. The core infrastructure will remain VMs for the foreseeable future.
I began doing Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR) development in 2006. Ruby had been around for awhile but the growing popularity of RoR was driving a lot of changes in the ecosystem in those years. It was a fun time but I was working for a large company that allowed me the time to keep up with everything. I see today’s frontend and container ecosystems in the light of that experience. I’m now more content to wait it out and let the dust settle as much as I enjoy learning new technology.
The second thing I’ve done is avoid containers. VMs work fine for many types of applications. That’s especially true if provisioning and configuration is mostly automated. A product like Google Cloud Run looks interesting for a few low-volume backend services that I operate. Containers are a good fit there because it simplifies operations rather than increases complexity. The core infrastructure will remain VMs for the foreseeable future.
I began doing Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR) development in 2006. Ruby had been around for awhile but the growing popularity of RoR was driving a lot of changes in the ecosystem in those years. It was a fun time but I was working for a large company that allowed me the time to keep up with everything. I see today’s frontend and container ecosystems in the light of that experience. I’m now more content to wait it out and let the dust settle as much as I enjoy learning new technology.