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As a developer or startup the last thing you want to do is tie yourself into absurdly proprietary platforms like this. Giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google a

As a developer or startup the last thing you want to do is tie yourself into absurdly proprietary platforms like this. Giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google are buying up all established competition, but now they want control of your stuff before you even make it. Also, user "nslog" only posts Amazon stuff and never comments.

40acres 9y ago
Once you reach a certain size I think it makes sense to explore rolling your own infrastructure but for an MVP or early stage startup not having to worry about infrastructure has got to be a god send. I recall hearing Kevin Systrom (Instagram) talk about how the app kept crashing on launch while it was being hosted on his single laptop. Imagine if he had EC2 :) (not that they needed it to grow)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sbov 9y ago
  I think the problem is more serverless architectures than EC2. If you build for EC2 you can probably fairly easily migrate between hosts (at least, for our codebase it is). But if you build for Amazon Lambda there's more vendor lock in.
  - monkmartinez 9y ago
    How so? My Python Lambda functions have almost zero AWS boilerplate besides passing in the event and context to the function whether I use it or not. I would argue that real infrastructure or vendor "lock in" is due to the friction of learning the API's associated with each cloud platform. Obviously, one can choose to use all the services of the cloud platform they will deploy to. However, and in most cases, that is not a strict requirement to use the cloud platform to begin with. "Lock in" seems more like a self-created problem than anything.
    - noobiemcfoob 9y ago
      Likewise. My lambda code can all be run outside of the lambda environment and retain full functionality. Each module has a small translation layer to take in the event and context before marshaling execution to other functions.
    - moduspol 9y ago
      > I would argue that real infrastructure or vendor "lock in" is due to the friction of learning the API's associated with each cloud platform. And it's not just cloud platforms. Every tool you use becomes more engrained the more you use it. Put plainly: It seems silly to me how people will shout "vendor lock-in" when using a service like DynamoDB or Kinesis, but will be more than happy to learn how to set up and maintain a Cassandra or Kafka cluster, along with Zookeeper, Puppet/Chef, and all that goes along with it. Those are not insignificant costs! I get that those aren't vendor-specific, but at some point you're just doing a lot more work, maintenance, and tying yourself down to a stack (and whatever employees became experts in them), and for what benefit? So you'll theoretically be able to move away faster if AWS goes rogue, long after your startup gains traction? I think those reflexively dismissing cloud services due to vendor lock-in need to take a step back and look at the big picture.
      - wolco 9y ago
        It's unimportant until it is. Costs are high for aws. You might be able to pay a little more now but when you need to scale you may find you are priced off of aws.
        moduspol 9y ago
        You're not paying more to start out. It will be far, far cheaper to just use Kinesis / Lambda / S3 than to pay someone to learn about, set up, manage, and maintain remotely comparable infrastructure. It will take far less code, infrastructure, maintenance, know-how, and time. It's not even close. More importantly, though: you quite possibly won't ever find yourself "priced off of aws." Netflix isn't. Workday isn't. Spotify isn't. Pinterest isn't. Dropbox only transitioned off very recently (reportedly for more control). Some of the biggest players on the web were able to scale and grow beyond most of our wildest dreams without it holding them back, yet still some recommend adding significant man-hours and complexity up-front just on the off-chance it becomes necessary after it's successful? Let's be realistic here.
- eterm 9y ago
  You only need to look at how well PUBG has handled the load of quickly becoming one of the most popular games to see the benefits of AWS. Yeah, their server software itself sucks a bit (low tick-rate, odd "de-sync"), but scaling itself has not been any issue: it feels the same now as it did with a tenth or a hundredth of the players it has right now. Compare that to the growing pains that, for example, league of legends had, where even several years in the whole of EUW would be practically down on weekends. (log in "queue" over 9000)
babo 9y ago
As a startup, the last thing to worry is vendor lock-in. With an architecture like this, you got fast time to market, minimal operations, scalability, zero starting cost, fair pricing. Just my 2c.
- malux85 9y ago
  actually it's not the last thing to worry about. I deliberately didn't vendor lock-in with my startup, and now I can deploy to Azure, AWS, and anyone who has a linux box. Being vendor independent has opened the door to a lot of sales that would not have been possible otherwise
  - k__ 9y ago
    if you sell services to consumers, you probably don't have to care too much.
  - sshumaker 9y ago
    Or you could have spent that dev time on product/market fit, growth, or making your customers happy instead. The cost calculus doesn't usually switch until you've pretty far along on solving those things.
jorblumesea 9y ago
As a startup if you make it to the "we regret tech decisions from 5 years ago" you're doing great. Better than the vast majority of startups. But otherwise I agree, vendor lock in seems out of control.
tptacek 9y ago
If you have a concern about what a particular HN user is doing vis a vis some other company, send it to hn@ycombinator.com. The guidelines specifically ask you not to bring those concerns to the thread.
wnevets 9y ago
the github account is amazon's https://github.com/awslabs https://github.com/awslabs
jonny_eh 9y ago
Netflix doesn't seem all that worried about locking in with AWS despite Amazon arguably being their biggest competitor.
jamesmishra 9y ago
Before you have product-market fit... vendor lock-in doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is getting to product-market fit. If you have some product-market fit, vendor lock-in probably doesn't matter. If your business is growing quickly and you have the ability to raise a strong Series A investment (if you wanted to), then vendor relationships are worth thinking about and engineering for the long term. Giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Google don't want to "control your stuff before you even make it" because most things that people make aren't worth their time. Once your business is growing steadily, however, this might change.
sshumaker 9y ago
Talk about a premature optimization. The only goal that matters for an early stage startup is product/market fit. If you can demonstrate traction you can raise money to buy yourself more time. For this, rapid iteration is critical. Use whatever tools help; vendor lock-in is something you solve when you have 20mm+ in the bank.
novembermike 9y ago
This isn't much lock-in though. It's just a way to server a bunch of static files. It would take a little effort to port it to google cloud or a random file server, but not that much effort.
blackoil 9y ago
Its a bad advice as per my experience, as a startup you'll have three problems cashflow, hiring, sales. Cash is your life blood, preserve it. Money you spent on boxes can give you 3 months additional runway, what you spent on devops could have been an additional sales person. Hiring will be a pain, especially if you are competing with giants or millions of dollar valuation startups. One less person you have to hire is eons you can spend on other things. Sales/Marketing would suck, you would spend more on getting the deal then you will make from that in 2 years. Your first 10 ideas to make the app viral will fail. Your dev time not going in ops. can be used to squeeze in that feature, the big fat wallet is asking for. Don't worry about vendor lockin, React patents, green earth. 90% chance you'll die before you hit that, make that 99% if you are worrying about that. You'll anyway rewrite/rearch. the thing you are writing, as your understanding of market will improve.
tluyben2 9y ago
I have followed that good advice for many years, but after running 5 pet projects (at least one of which has a lot of traffic) and all dev activity for over a year on Amazon for not even $90 / month in total, I started to see if differently now. With Beanstalk and all the services it is just too easy and too cheap to get going. Maybe later on it will cost more than a dedi server but the time to market and me not swearing at servers is better for business and my private life.

40acres 9y ago

Once you reach a certain size I think it makes sense to explore rolling your own infrastructure but for an MVP or early stage startup not having to worry about infrastructure has got to be a god send. I recall hearing Kevin Systrom (Instagram) talk about how the app kept crashing on launch while it was being hosted on his single laptop. Imagine if he had EC2 :) (not that they needed it to grow)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sbov 9y ago
I think the problem is more serverless architectures than EC2. If you build for EC2 you can probably fairly easily migrate between hosts (at least, for our codebase it is). But if you build for Amazon Lambda there's more vendor lock in.
- monkmartinez 9y ago
  How so? My Python Lambda functions have almost zero AWS boilerplate besides passing in the event and context to the function whether I use it or not. I would argue that real infrastructure or vendor "lock in" is due to the friction of learning the API's associated with each cloud platform. Obviously, one can choose to use all the services of the cloud platform they will deploy to. However, and in most cases, that is not a strict requirement to use the cloud platform to begin with. "Lock in" seems more like a self-created problem than anything.
  - noobiemcfoob 9y ago
    Likewise. My lambda code can all be run outside of the lambda environment and retain full functionality. Each module has a small translation layer to take in the event and context before marshaling execution to other functions.
  - moduspol 9y ago
    > I would argue that real infrastructure or vendor "lock in" is due to the friction of learning the API's associated with each cloud platform. And it's not just cloud platforms. Every tool you use becomes more engrained the more you use it. Put plainly: It seems silly to me how people will shout "vendor lock-in" when using a service like DynamoDB or Kinesis, but will be more than happy to learn how to set up and maintain a Cassandra or Kafka cluster, along with Zookeeper, Puppet/Chef, and all that goes along with it. Those are not insignificant costs! I get that those aren't vendor-specific, but at some point you're just doing a lot more work, maintenance, and tying yourself down to a stack (and whatever employees became experts in them), and for what benefit? So you'll theoretically be able to move away faster if AWS goes rogue, long after your startup gains traction? I think those reflexively dismissing cloud services due to vendor lock-in need to take a step back and look at the big picture.
    - wolco 9y ago
      It's unimportant until it is. Costs are high for aws. You might be able to pay a little more now but when you need to scale you may find you are priced off of aws.
      - moduspol 9y ago
        You're not paying more to start out. It will be far, far cheaper to just use Kinesis / Lambda / S3 than to pay someone to learn about, set up, manage, and maintain remotely comparable infrastructure. It will take far less code, infrastructure, maintenance, know-how, and time. It's not even close. More importantly, though: you quite possibly won't ever find yourself "priced off of aws." Netflix isn't. Workday isn't. Spotify isn't. Pinterest isn't. Dropbox only transitioned off very recently (reportedly for more control). Some of the biggest players on the web were able to scale and grow beyond most of our wildest dreams without it holding them back, yet still some recommend adding significant man-hours and complexity up-front just on the off-chance it becomes necessary after it's successful? Let's be realistic here.
eterm 9y ago
You only need to look at how well PUBG has handled the load of quickly becoming one of the most popular games to see the benefits of AWS. Yeah, their server software itself sucks a bit (low tick-rate, odd "de-sync"), but scaling itself has not been any issue: it feels the same now as it did with a tenth or a hundredth of the players it has right now. Compare that to the growing pains that, for example, league of legends had, where even several years in the whole of EUW would be practically down on weekends. (log in "queue" over 9000)

babo 9y ago

As a startup, the last thing to worry is vendor lock-in. With an architecture like this, you got fast time to market, minimal operations, scalability, zero starting cost, fair pricing. Just my 2c.

malux85 9y ago
actually it's not the last thing to worry about. I deliberately didn't vendor lock-in with my startup, and now I can deploy to Azure, AWS, and anyone who has a linux box. Being vendor independent has opened the door to a lot of sales that would not have been possible otherwise
- k__ 9y ago
  if you sell services to consumers, you probably don't have to care too much.
- sshumaker 9y ago
  Or you could have spent that dev time on product/market fit, growth, or making your customers happy instead. The cost calculus doesn't usually switch until you've pretty far along on solving those things.

jorblumesea 9y ago

As a startup if you make it to the "we regret tech decisions from 5 years ago" you're doing great. Better than the vast majority of startups. But otherwise I agree, vendor lock in seems out of control.

tptacek 9y ago

If you have a concern about what a particular HN user is doing vis a vis some other company, send it to hn@ycombinator.com. The guidelines specifically ask you not to bring those concerns to the thread.

wnevets 9y ago

the github account is amazon's https://github.com/awslabs https://github.com/awslabs

jonny_eh 9y ago

Netflix doesn't seem all that worried about locking in with AWS despite Amazon arguably being their biggest competitor.

jamesmishra 9y ago

Before you have product-market fit... vendor lock-in doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is getting to product-market fit. If you have some product-market fit, vendor lock-in probably doesn't matter. If your business is growing quickly and you have the ability to raise a strong Series A investment (if you wanted to), then vendor relationships are worth thinking about and engineering for the long term. Giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Google don't want to "control your stuff before you even make it" because most things that people make aren't worth their time. Once your business is growing steadily, however, this might change.

sshumaker 9y ago

Talk about a premature optimization. The only goal that matters for an early stage startup is product/market fit. If you can demonstrate traction you can raise money to buy yourself more time. For this, rapid iteration is critical. Use whatever tools help; vendor lock-in is something you solve when you have 20mm+ in the bank.

novembermike 9y ago

This isn't much lock-in though. It's just a way to server a bunch of static files. It would take a little effort to port it to google cloud or a random file server, but not that much effort.

blackoil 9y ago

Its a bad advice as per my experience, as a startup you'll have three problems cashflow, hiring, sales. Cash is your life blood, preserve it. Money you spent on boxes can give you 3 months additional runway, what you spent on devops could have been an additional sales person. Hiring will be a pain, especially if you are competing with giants or millions of dollar valuation startups. One less person you have to hire is eons you can spend on other things. Sales/Marketing would suck, you would spend more on getting the deal then you will make from that in 2 years. Your first 10 ideas to make the app viral will fail. Your dev time not going in ops. can be used to squeeze in that feature, the big fat wallet is asking for. Don't worry about vendor lockin, React patents, green earth. 90% chance you'll die before you hit that, make that 99% if you are worrying about that. You'll anyway rewrite/rearch. the thing you are writing, as your understanding of market will improve.

tluyben2 9y ago

I have followed that good advice for many years, but after running 5 pet projects (at least one of which has a lot of traffic) and all dev activity for over a year on Amazon for not even $90 / month in total, I started to see if differently now. With Beanstalk and all the services it is just too easy and too cheap to get going. Maybe later on it will cost more than a dedi server but the time to market and me not swearing at servers is better for business and my private life.