dbackeus

Because it's a fully featured public relations platform, not just a "newsdesk" (though that's what it started as some 20 years ago).

We have a main monolithic application at the core. But there are plenty of ancillary applications used to run the various parts of our application (eg. analytics, media monitoring, social media monitoring, journalist databases, media delivery, LLM based content sugestion etc).

Then we have at least one staging deployment for each app (the monolith has multiple). All permutations of apps and environments reach about 50 applications deployed on the platform, all with their own highly available databases (Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch and soon ClickHouse).

I suppose it is. But no actual users of the platform has had any complaints about it.

Not from our point of view since Cloudflare's DDOS production and CDN is a crucial part of our architecture.

That said, switching out cloudflared for a more traditional ingress like nginx etc would be straight forward. No parts of the RtS tooling as actually dependent on using Cloudflare for ingress in particular.

It's all in one app and the app has a ton of users. Anyone running the app can join any server with a click of a button. There are no separate accounts required to join different communities.

So communities being separate "spaces" doesn't create any meaningful friction with regards to adoption.

Feel free to join the RtS discord if you want to bounce ideas for your upcoming infra

Main difference is that Dokku is a simple single server platform, geared mostly toward hobby projects.

Reclaim the Stack provides a fully highly available multi node platform to host large scale SaaS applications aiming for four nines of uptime.

(Reclaim the Stack creator here)

We don't do autoscaling.

The main reason for Kubernetes for us was automation of monitoring / logs / alerting and highly available database deployments.

37signals has a dedicated operations team with more than 10 people. We have 0 dedicated operations people. We would not have been able to run our product with Kamal given our four nines uptime target.

(that said, I do like Kamal, especially v2 seems to smooth out some edges, and I'm all for simple single server deployments)

We've since migrated more stuff. We're currently saving more than $400k/year.

> Assuming average salary of 140k/year

Is that what developers at your company cost?

Just curious. In Sweden the average devops salary is around 60k.

> you are dedicating 2 resources 3 times a month and this is already costing you ~38k/year on salaries

Ok. So we're currently saving more than 400k/year on our migration. That would be worth 38k/year in salaries to us. But note that our actual salary costs are significantly lower.

> that's assuming your engineers have somehow mastered_both_ devops and software (very unlikely)

Both me and my colleague are proficient at operations as well as programming. I personally believe the skillsets are complimentary and that web developers need to get into operations / scaling to fully understand their craft. But I've deployed web sites since the 90s. Maybe I'm a of a different breed.

We achieved 4 nines of up time in our first year on this platform which is more than we ever achieved using Heroku + other managed cloud services. We won't reach 4 nines in our second year due to a network failure on Hetzner, but so far we have not had downtime due to software issues.

> This also assumes your infra doesn't grow and requires more maintenance

In general the more our infra grows the more we save (and we're still in the process of cutting additional costs as we slowly migrate more stuff over). Since our stack is automated we don't see any significant overhead in maintenance time for adding additional servers.

Potentially some crazy new software could come along that would turn out to be hard to deploy. But if it would be cheaper to use a managed option for that crazy software we could still just use a managed service. It's not like we're making it impossible to use external services by self-hosting.

Note that I wouldn't recommend Reclaim the Stack to early stage startups with minor hosting requirements. As mentioned on our site I think it becomes interesting around $5,000/month in spending (but this will of course vary on a number of factors).

> Focusing on building features and generating revenue is much valuable than wasting precious engineering time maintain stacks.

That's a fair take. But the trade-offs will look different for every company.

What was amazing for us was that the developer experience of our platform ended up being significantly better than Heroku's. So we are now shipping faster. Reducing costs by an order of magnitude also allowed us to take on data intensive additions to our product which we would have never considered in the previous deployment paradigm since costs would have been prohibitively high.