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Running your own stuff becomes more expensive when you want monitoring, Load Balancers, HA, VPN's into your corporate network and constant database backups. And

by UK-AL 10y ago

Running your own stuff becomes more expensive when you want monitoring, Load Balancers, HA, VPN's into your corporate network and constant database backups. And then making it really robust. Hiring all the staff for that can be expensive. Problem is there are lot of developers who think setting up a virtual machine putting a db on it, and then a webserver on another without thinking about all the other stuff that can go wrong.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
> Hiring all the staff for that can be expensive. Competent, experienced staff to run the core of your business has a cost. You can replace ops with managed services no more than I can replace devs with cheap, untrained labor in Asia.
- UK-AL 10y ago
  I never said replace, just augment. You may need fewer, but you still need people to monitor, deploy and orchestrate these different services. At the end of the day the extra cost is going toward hiring engineers at the hosters side for managed services but benefiting from their scale. Either way your going to have to pay for skilled operational engineers.
mgkimsal 10y ago
There's a balance to be had, and there's very likely different periods in a business lifecycle where some environments make more sense than others. There's a pretty big cost to learning how to manage and get value all the AWS stuff, and in the early days of a project - especially true in the 'startup' world - there are probably more areas where $ can be spent to create more value. I've seen far too many people spin up multiple AWS and tie themselves to expensive AWS setups when a small linode or other VPS (managed or otherwise) would have been more than adequate for the first year. There's this weird view people that have it's either 100% AWS or hire full time developers and buy a bunch of bare metal. There's a lot of middle ground which can provide a good amount of value while giving you time to ramp up. The fact that you're referencing tying VPNs to a corporate network means you're already far more advanced than a lot of the smaller orgs I've run in to tying themselves to AWS when far less expensive alternatives exist. Again, saying this as someone who uses and likes Amazon stuff, just not exclusively.
- UK-AL 10y ago
  It can still be an issue. It would still be a disaster if in the first year, the database got corrupt or hacked? Lone developers might tempted just to setup database without setting up a backup solution and HA. Amazon has that at click of a button. For a developer/infrastructure guy probably 1/2/3 days if you know what your doing. If you don't know what your doing for your specific brand of database, you might not set it up right which is a big risk which only shows up once it's failed. There's a reason DBA's can get paid a lot, because there's a lot to know. I think as a startup, you need to take all the shortcuts you can grab. Getting it out, and time to market is very important. Focusing on price at first can cost more than its worth. It depends on if you want to pay more for having quick setup and having amazons engineers looking after backups and HA or do you want to pay less, spend more time doing it yourself and getting the skills to make sure its setup correctly.

by UK-AL 10y ago

toomuchtodo 10y ago

> Hiring all the staff for that can be expensive. Competent, experienced staff to run the core of your business has a cost. You can replace ops with managed services no more than I can replace devs with cheap, untrained labor in Asia.

UK-AL 10y ago
I never said replace, just augment. You may need fewer, but you still need people to monitor, deploy and orchestrate these different services. At the end of the day the extra cost is going toward hiring engineers at the hosters side for managed services but benefiting from their scale. Either way your going to have to pay for skilled operational engineers.

mgkimsal 10y ago

There's a balance to be had, and there's very likely different periods in a business lifecycle where some environments make more sense than others. There's a pretty big cost to learning how to manage and get value all the AWS stuff, and in the early days of a project - especially true in the 'startup' world - there are probably more areas where $ can be spent to create more value. I've seen far too many people spin up multiple AWS and tie themselves to expensive AWS setups when a small linode or other VPS (managed or otherwise) would have been more than adequate for the first year. There's this weird view people that have it's either 100% AWS or hire full time developers and buy a bunch of bare metal. There's a lot of middle ground which can provide a good amount of value while giving you time to ramp up. The fact that you're referencing tying VPNs to a corporate network means you're already far more advanced than a lot of the smaller orgs I've run in to tying themselves to AWS when far less expensive alternatives exist. Again, saying this as someone who uses and likes Amazon stuff, just not exclusively.

UK-AL 10y ago
It can still be an issue. It would still be a disaster if in the first year, the database got corrupt or hacked? Lone developers might tempted just to setup database without setting up a backup solution and HA. Amazon has that at click of a button. For a developer/infrastructure guy probably 1/2/3 days if you know what your doing. If you don't know what your doing for your specific brand of database, you might not set it up right which is a big risk which only shows up once it's failed. There's a reason DBA's can get paid a lot, because there's a lot to know. I think as a startup, you need to take all the shortcuts you can grab. Getting it out, and time to market is very important. Focusing on price at first can cost more than its worth. It depends on if you want to pay more for having quick setup and having amazons engineers looking after backups and HA or do you want to pay less, spend more time doing it yourself and getting the skills to make sure its setup correctly.