My scale is unpredictable. I don't sell software, I sell consulting and training services. To make our business run smoothly and maximize the available time of

My scale is unpredictable. I don't sell software, I sell consulting and training services. To make our business run smoothly and maximize the available time of the two of us who run the place, we can't be held down by managing servers and services. Investing in things like API Gateway and Lambda gives me the ability to keep my programming desires satisfied, while reducing the friction of tedious, time wasting operations, like automatically encoding a video of a class, extracting thumbnails, and setting permissions via API calls back to our home-brewed DAM system to make the video available for our students. Sure, I could do it myself each time. Six times per day of teaching. And turn down the process priority so it won't interfere with the rest of my job. The costs of using AWS at that scale, while certainly nothing like the scale some of you are dealing with, are a considerable savings over the hourly rate I can charge for the time spent in my subject domain, and would have otherwise lost. We manage VMs for classes already, and most of that is now automated by our Hubot. In the coming weeks, the services/sites/apps we do have running will be migrated over to the docker-based infrastructure I'm building (in my copious free time, ha!), and the services therein will be interconnected with API Gateway and Lambda functions. It's a beautiful thing. I'm really quite pleased with it, and proud of what we've been able to do. I'm know that I'm not alone, and maybe this post will encourage others in similar situations to share their experiences too. Maybe my peers don't frequent HN - that's an unknown to me, I guess. But there are far more entrepreneurs like me who enjoy the job we do, and will do everything we can to offload the time sucking administrivia to some other system, especially if we get to flex our programming muscles along the way.