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The biggest cost many young companies face is people, both salaries, and management/coordination overhead. Assuming you need to pay someone at least 10k/month

The biggest cost many young companies face is people, both salaries, and management/coordination overhead. Assuming you need to pay someone at least 10k/month fully-loaded (and this is hard in SF) to manage all of this, I wouldn't bat an eye at staying on a PaaS until I got to 10-20k/month in expenses. Maybe even 30k. Managing operating systems, networking switches, datacenter contracts, linux distros, provisioning scripts, etc? No thanks. I guess if you're worried about single dollars or tens of dollars/month you're just in a completely different place/situation than I am. With dev salaries being what they are today, the market is clearly signaling you need to optimize to use as little of it as possible. Another thing, this article doesn't talk about serverless at all, where there isn't even compute to provision.

cookiecaper 9y ago
You want "provisioning scripts" no matter what. That's what ensures your systems are uniform and that you can easily and semi-sanely maintain them. Deploying a server without some type of scripted process is like deploying a codebase without version control. You're just crossing your fingers and jumping off the bridge with a hope and prayer that something that happened in the background sometime in the past makes it all work, and no way to track what's really happening. This is even more precarious with servers than with code because servers have tons of little highly-specific config changes that are much more difficult to transfer than copying and pasting `BOBS_PROGRAM_v2017-08-04.EXE`. ----- A small shop should be able to manage their own servers as long as they remain reasonable with it (i.e., don't "scale out" to an infrastructure with 40 microservices running 8 instances each). You don't need to pay a guy $10k/mo to admin the 4-6 boxes that may actually be needed. If people are the key to a good startup, why forward the equivalent of 2 coders' pay to Amazon? The frequently-unacknowledged reality behind AWS et al is that many devs aren't what they're cracked up to be.

cookiecaper 9y ago

You want "provisioning scripts" no matter what. That's what ensures your systems are uniform and that you can easily and semi-sanely maintain them. Deploying a server without some type of scripted process is like deploying a codebase without version control. You're just crossing your fingers and jumping off the bridge with a hope and prayer that something that happened in the background sometime in the past makes it all work, and no way to track what's really happening. This is even more precarious with servers than with code because servers have tons of little highly-specific config changes that are much more difficult to transfer than copying and pasting `BOBS_PROGRAM_v2017-08-04.EXE`. ----- A small shop should be able to manage their own servers as long as they remain reasonable with it (i.e., don't "scale out" to an infrastructure with 40 microservices running 8 instances each). You don't need to pay a guy $10k/mo to admin the 4-6 boxes that may actually be needed. If people are the key to a good startup, why forward the equivalent of 2 coders' pay to Amazon? The frequently-unacknowledged reality behind AWS et al is that many devs aren't what they're cracked up to be.