

Ask HN: infrastructure in a box for distributed team - newhire

Due to a company going under, myself and some fellow developers have been encouraged to start something ourselves. We have an idea we feel strongly about and have started prototyping the code. We really don't want to spend time building or maintaining infrastructure.. and we have the money to pay for a solid one. Can anyone recommend some good hosted infrastructure in a box for a software dev team? Eg. we need the usual mail, web, bug tracking, source control, etc etc.<p>We're thinking of going for google apps for mail/chat/basic-word-docs. For development infrastructure we'd rather have a single integrated service rather than pay different people for different pieces. We need security, and we want it managed for us. We'll run our own development/qa/prod servers since we have special needs (cuda hardware, special OS versions etc) but don't want to run the generic infrastructure.<p>Any suggestions? We'd be happy to support HN companies..
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mrshoe
We've been very happy with Google apps. It's nice not to have to think about
infrastructure at all. It just works.

We run our own instance of Trac and svn on a slicehost slice, which is
relatively painless to maintain. Using github or bitbucket would be another
good option there.

For a distributed team, I do have to make a shameless plug for my own startup:
<http://shoptalkapp.com>. Communication is key, and IM just doesn't cut it,
we've found. We're always looking for feedback from fellow HNers, so let me
know if you try it out.

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grandalf
google apps / github / slicehost

What more do you need?

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newhire
Why would I want slicehost? I don't want a vps - I want someone else's hosted
services rather than running them myself. For dev/qa/prod hardware we have 20
dl585s on order plus some nvidia tesla rackmounts. Its the infrastructure I'm
looking for.

github gets me a small source repository. Their biggest plan is 60GB. We have
more data than that in our initial test cases. I'm sure we could work
something out with them but that doesn't help with other things. I guess we
could combine with lighthouseapp.com to get issue tracking. Or use unfuddle to
get integrated svn and issue tracking. Rally or basecamp for project
management. saleforce for crm.

I was hoping someone had nicely integrated everything in a reasonable cost
package - by programmers for programmers.

~~~
grandalf
I'm not familiar with anything like that...

I'd suggest just contacting github for a quote... I am guessing that if you're
comfortable hosting your code on github's servers that you'll get a way better
workflow and lower maintenance overhead than if you went with one of other
proprietary companies...

I just mentioned slicehost in case you needed servers... b/c it's really cheap
and easy to use.

I think you should make the decision based on scm workflow and code review
workflow, not based on one vendor offering the exact set of products you hope
to find.

