Startups should keep their infrastructure: SIMPLE

In todays world it can be easy to go out and build a super cool scalable solution with Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and AI. What I tell people who are still in the process of gaining customers for their startup, is to keep the infrastructure “Stupid Simple.”

What does it mean to keep the infrastructure “Stupid Simple.”

LAMP stack ( Linux; Apache; MySQL; PHP) baby! LAMP stack has been around for awhile and isn’t anything “sexy.” The biggest thing is that it gets the job done. When growing your startup to a small business, it is important to keep overhead low. A.K.A, keeping complexity minimal. Below I’ll provide a quick guide on how you can setup a fairly minimal infrastructure setup inside your AWS account.

To clarify: The solution I’ll be providing is a simple EC2 instance ASG (auto scaling group) with connectivity to an RDS instance. We aren’t doing a “true” LAMP stack as we are separating the database from the instance but that is because we want the application code to be stateless. The state can be managed in Elasticsearch, Redis, and/or MySQL database.

Terraform

If you are unfamiliar with Terraform, then I’ll quickly get you caught up on what it is. Terraform is like any other coding language as it has a specific purpose. Terraform falls under the IaC (infrastructure as code) group. As IaC sounds, it is in charge of writing out the infrastructure as code. This help keep the infrastructure to a desired state and allows you to quickly spin up new infrastructure.

Standing up your infrastructure

git clone https://github.com/austin-cottrell/iac-templates/tree/main
cd iac-templates/terraform/keep-it-simple
make dev

This will generate a simple development environment for you. It will prompt you a couple of questions on setting up terraform/AWSCLI if you have not done so before. I also included a README for every keep-it-simple terraform directory.

Still have questions?

I am here to help! If you would like to setup a keeping it simple environment for your startup, reach out to me in the contact section of the website or email me at contact@devops4u.io.

If you have issues with the iac-templates please submit a issue on the github repository and I will answer your question there.