I have a friend who is the sole programmer for his company, but is having practical issues finding the time to "do things right"

They are a small company so spinning up 100 EC2s isn't an option, but I was wondering if anyone had experience getting stuff like secrets management and database replication set up and has resources bookmarked that have "the right advice" - if that makes sense

My only advice is use managed services as much as possible. Pick one of the three cloud vendors and embrace lock in... it makes life so much easier.

seriously, in this case just use Heroku. if the business is doing so well to start worrying about infra and hiring an ops person, that’s a great time to start thinking about that.

heroku postgres is still one of the best managed options out there.