Top all-time · #6966
layerci.com
Company blog · layerci.com/blogprogrammingweb
layerci.com is the company blog at layerci.com, writing about programming and web. Since 2019, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “System design hack: Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link LayerCI, a staging-environment and CI product, and one of its blog posts on using PostgreSQL as a queue. The comments mostly compare the product with other tools rather than judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-07-22
- System design hack: Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-11-08
- Analyze what packages are contributing to your bundle size with this analyzer2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-22
What Hacker News says?
On behalf of everyone here, thanks a lot for answering every single question being asked. Highly appreciate it. I have questions myself: 1. Did it reduce (TCO) costs or increase it versus using Kinesis and SQS/SNS? 1a. Interestingly, there's no global-replication with those AWS services. Why did you require global-replication with the move to Apache Pulsar? 2. Since you mention internal auth : Weren't Cognito / KMS…
Comment linking /blog/postgres-is-the-answer/
on “Apache Pulsar is an open-source distributed pub-sub messaging system”Submitted System design hack: Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server as a story · 852 points
HN discussionThe hypervisor migration features you mention are really powerful and stable. I founded a startup that does fast CI using them. This is what it looks like: https://layerci.com/jobs/github/layerdemo/layer-gogs-demo/18 (in this run it restored a previous VM snapshot to skip the setup, and took a snapshot after the webserver started to give a lazy-loaded staging server)
Comment linking /jobs/github/layerdemo/layer-gogs-demo/18
on “Teleforking a Process onto a Different Computer”Submitted Show HN: Layer – Get a dozen staging servers per developer as a story · 155 points
HN discussionLayerCI[1] maybe? [1] - https://layerci.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Cheapest/easiest way to host a static site?”Submitted Crypto miners are killing free CI as a story · 120 points
HN discussionSeems related to this one from a week ago: https://layerci.com/blog/postgres-is-the-answer/
Comment linking /blog/postgres-is-the-answer/
on “Turning PostgreSQL into a queue serving 10k jobs per second (2013)”Submitted Serverless is more expensive than you'd expect (2021) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMy YC company is a GitHub app [1] and the "act on your behalf" thing is just a really poorly written message for the new (github apps vs oauth apps) apps interface. There's even a hilarious thread on the github forum itself about "act on your behalf" when all it requests is your email and avatar [2] Ironically the newer apps system does have fine grained permissions, but seems more intrusive because of the strange w…
Comment linking /
on “GitHub Has a Permission Problem”Submitted How to open a reverse tunnel into any pod or container with tcpserver and netcat as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHey, I've been working on a CI tool that skips the "non-trivial" bits for arbitrary Linux workflows, would love your feedback: https://layerci.com
Comment linking /
on “The Difference Between CI and CD”Submitted Footer Signalling as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWe're building something like what you describe (YC S20) - https://layerci.com - it's similar to OP but meant for standard containers instead of serverless. TL;DR: 1. Install on GitHub https://github.com/apps/layerci/installations/new 2. Create files called 'Layerfile' to configure the pipeline Docker Compose example for step 3: https://layerci.com/docs/examples/docker-compose Then just point it at a docker swarm cl…
Comment linking /docs/examples/docker-compose
on “Launch HN: Seed (YC W21) – A Fully-Managed CI/CD Pipeline for Serverless”Submitted How to get into Y Combinator: application tips from the founders of LayerCI as a story · 3 points
HN discussion12 is the max parallelization, so you could define more but some of them might queue. All databases that run locally (mongo included) are supported, here's the doc page for that: https://layerci.com/docs/advanced-workflows/layerfiles-can-s... We have a secrets dashboard, they are stored encrypted in our database (though many users have something like hashicorp vault with a central repository, with only the access ke…
Comment linking /docs/advanced-workflows/layerfiles-can-set-up-a-migrated-database-in-5-seconds
on “Launch HN: LayerCI (YC S20) - Staging servers that act like (and replace) CI”Submitted CI configs should be documentation as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's basically the same concern as having them in source code, we want to be able to control/restrict access to them. In AWS we can do that becase they're encrypted with a KMS key and unless a user/role has permission to decrypt with that key it can't decrypt the secret. This does assume that AWS aren't lying about encrypting things, and that their employees can't access our KMS keys. We currently use Gitlab for our…
Comment linking /docs/layerfile-reference/secret-env
on “Launch HN: LayerCI (YC S20) - Staging servers that act like (and replace) CI”Submitted Show HN: Visualize big packages in NodeJS's Package-Lock.json as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhow do you know which steps to skip or rerun each run. in your react example, how do you know when to reinstall yarn to latest version and when to skip. https://layerci.com/docs/examples/react
Comment linking /docs/examples/react
on “Launch HN: LayerCI (YC S20) - Staging servers that act like (and replace) CI”Submitted Analyze what packages are contributing to your bundle size with this analyzer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYes, it's quite simple if you use something like docker compose. If your frontend/backend are in separate repositories, I'd reference this doc page: https://layerci.com/docs/advanced-workflows/routing
Comment linking /docs/advanced-workflows/routing
on “Launch HN: LayerCI (YC S20) - Staging servers that act like (and replace) CI”We're actually in the process of getting SOC2 and pen tests ourselves - another benefit of a hosted offering is it can (eventually) integrate into your compliance system (e.g., vanta) A lot of our customers are in fintech (payroll, banking, etc) so we've spent a lot of effort on our security model: https://layerci.com/security
Comment linking /security
on “Launch HN: LayerCI (YC S20) - Staging servers that act like (and replace) CI”If the state is broken, you can "rerun without snapshots" via the dropdown in the top right - and since future runs load the latest snapshot, they'd use a "clean" one. For databases - usually users have a named S3 bucket and use a secret to authenticate, since we take memory snapshots, the top of your Layerfile can be "start the database and populate it from this specific anonymized dump" and then you can edit the f…
Comment linking /docs/advanced-workflows/layerfiles-can-set-up-a-migrated-database-in-5-seconds
on “Launch HN: LayerCI (YC S20) - Staging servers that act like (and replace) CI”With Kubernetes, a typical workflow might look like this: 1. Start kubernetes cluster 2. Build docker images 3. Deploy docker images (helm, kubectl, argocd, ...) 4(a) Run unit tests (kubectl exec -l k8s-app=web rake test) 4(b) Run e2e tests (kubectl run cypress) 4(c) Create ephemeral environment (EXPOSE WEBSITE localhost:8000) Because we take memory snapshots after each step, you'd effectively get a fresh, fully-pro…
Comment linking /blog/ci-at-layerci/
on “Launch HN: LayerCI (YC S20) - Staging servers that act like (and replace) CI”How do you compare with LayerCI ( https://layerci.com/ )?
Comment linking /
on “Launch HN: Reploy (YC S20) – Instant fullstack staging environments for web apps”Hey, this looks really cool. In my line of work [1] I talk to a lot of developers about productivity, here are some questions about what you've built in the context of that experience: 1. I think (as you mentioned) "number of commits" or "number of pull requests" merged are proxies for productivity at best. Most teams that I've seen care more about "are the tasks for the epic being chipped down" - is that something…
Comment linking /
on “Launch HN: Haystack (YC W21) – Engineering analytics that don’t suck”This seems very similar to https://layerci.com/ LayerCI seems to have some “secret sauce” in the caching mechanisms to speed up builds. This seems to take a wider approach offer environments outside of just CI. Any other notable differentiators?
Comment linking /
on “ReleaseHub Environments as a Service Gets 2.7M Seed from Sequoia”Hey HN, We built this as a little hackathon project on top of our "get a dozen staging servers" platform at https://layerci.com The "show layer" gallery lets you create instantaneous staging servers to play around with software, as well as discussing it and submitting your own favorites for the community to use. Submitting is currently pretty difficult, but we'll try to add any projects you submit, even if you don't…
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Try out OSS webapps before installing them”