This seems super complex to me. I am a single dev that runs a $30k\mo software based company off of PHP+MariaDB+bootstrap+jQuery+few other plugins. Hosted on a managed HIPPA setup. The firewall+app+DB servers run me about $550\month and I have excellent support. I spend effectively 100% of my time on business logic\ui and zero time keeping up to date on infrastructure (and learning it). Which means my customers benefit from me fixing problems and adding features. Kudos to what works for you....super great... And, for me at least...it is even more "boring" and awesome.
VMRacks (now hipaavault.com). I'm not affiliated, just a completely satisfied customer. As to setting up the business, I would also recommend a HIPAA auditing/hand-holding company. I use Compliancy Group (https://compliancy-group.com).
Just finished my undergrad in cis, and have been grasping at the many services in the industry. How did you find yourself in freelance within clients needing HIPAA compliant?
I am surrounded by people in the primarily private-pay Mental Health space because my (romantic) partner is a consultant in a tiny cottage industry. In my case, it's 100% "people you know". Dealing in PII suuuuuuucks because I constantly have an elevated anxiety about it. However, if it wasn't PII plus the people I know and met......then I probably wouldn't have the opportunity I have.
That said.....had I not done "this", then I probably would have done something more lucrative and "easy". I see non-PII opportunities everywhere, and (mostly) only hang around because what I do now pays the bills.
similarly , making half that and using dedicated servers. When you re a solo dev you dont really have time to risk learning unproven tech or tech that doesnt scale. And as a dev i like writing code that does new and interesting things, not learning tools and other people's APIs. The amount of services this guy has to manage is mind-boggling, and unfortunately i m simple and stupid. I guess i m a hermit dev but thankfully i ll never need to work for others again.
All of that is a very typical Django stack with React bolted onto the frontend. Whether he runs into trouble managing RabbitMQ, Redis, Postgres or any of the Python services is another story, but at least if he did there are many, many others using the exact same stack, so he should be able to easily find answers to people experiencing the same problems. All of these technologies have several year track records now, too, so (hopefully) they are stable and reliable in production. My biggest concern would be managing the ES cluster.
On the other hand, I disagree with his points about docker being overly complex. Docker images are simple. Kubernetes, once you get the hang of it, is great on GKE and gives you automatic SSL via Google or let’s encrypt, and load balancing and auto-scaling just works. It’s probably more expensive than managing your own servers, at this level, but maybe not since you could pack more services into fewer compute instances.
