5 ms·

> If you're still using a single server, you're doing something horribly wrong This is so far from the truth. If you built your (fairly new) app, especially a

by hw 8y ago

> If you're still using a single server, you're doing something horribly wrong This is so far from the truth. If you built your (fairly new) app, especially a new app, such that it requires multiple servers, then you're overthinking infrastructure at a time when you don't need it. Having multiple servers is great, but having a lean app that can run on a single server requires a different skillset. You don't need HA, multi-AZ AWS deployments behind a load balancer with route 53 DNS load balancing powered by auto scaling fleets with ci/cd jenkins and slack chat ops when you only have a small number of users.

013a 8y ago
You can pick one sentence out of my comment and tear it apart, or actually read and understand the whole thing. Your choice. Managing servers is something no startup should be doing. Period. If you can SSH into it, you're wasting time on infrastructure that could be spent finding product-market fit. The number of servers isn't the relevant points; its the fact that he's using ANY servers.
- hw 8y ago
  I get that part. If only all startups could afford managed PaaS services. I might be biased given I've spun up and managed my own infrastructure without much difficulty, and I can see how some startups would prefer spending the dough on PaaS instead of say hiring or putting it towards marketing. I just had an issue with that blanket statement that it's not kosher to be using a server still. It's totally fine for a startup to be managing their own infrastructure if they've done the cost benefit analysis on it.
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    Startups can’t afford not to use PaaS. Every second of time they piss away managing their home brew platform is a second they aren’t spending time making their product something people actually want. Managing infrastructure is a solved problem for any startup. Simply spin something up on a heroku-like platform and be done. Anything else is wasting precious time and money.
  - 013a 8y ago
    Heroku costs $20/month/dyno. You can probably compare the performance of that to a t3.nano, which is ~$4/month. An engineer costs, lets say $7000/month. Now, all you have to ask is: How much time will the engineer be investing in the infra every month. Lets say you SSH in and update the system packages. 10 minutes? That's $6. Hope nothing goes wrong during the upgrade; remember, you're on the clock. Every minute you spend with that shell open is wasting money. Need to add SSH access for the new guy? Oof, we're gonna have to exchange some SSH keys, that might take 20 minutes. $12. Just got an email from AWS about a new Ubuntu AMI that fixes a security vulnerability... lets plan an upgrade. 1 hour. $30. We want to be more resilient against AWS maintenance downtime on instances, so lets bake an AMI and create an ASG. That's not too hard. Maybe a couple hours. Oh... we just paid the difference for Heroku for an entire year. AND our engineers were able to focus on the product.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  That obviously depends on how much effort/how expensive "managing servers" via ssh vs. managing cloud infrastructure is. Developing, installing, configuring, and monitoring/troubleshooting apps isn't for free on cloud either (like, not at all).
- jwr 8y ago
  I disagree. I regularly do a sanity check for my business, and it always turns out that two physical $40/month servers make a lot more sense for me than any PaaS offering, or even just AWS EC2. Guess what, managing a small amount of servers (two) isn't that hard and doesn't take a lot of time, and $40/month gets you really fast CPUs and lots of RAM these days. As always, generalized absolute statements make no sense: everything should be analyzed in context, and based on specific metrics (in my case: money).
  - nwsm 8y ago
    Do you know what your business would cost in PaaS monthly, in comparison to the $80 + labor it currently costs?
    - jwr 8y ago
      Yes, significantly more for comparable performance. And then PaaS is not a silver bullet, either: every service has SLOs and downtime.
  - 013a 8y ago
    If it doesn't make sense for you, then you're not a startup. That sounds ipso facto, like I'm saying "PaaS is the best option for startups, because if it didn't make sense you're not a startup." but I mean it legitimately. Startups are VERY DIFFERENT from normal businesses, in almost every conceivable way. Great startup engineers do not necessarily make great "normal business" engineers. Great startup infrastructure looks nothing like great normal infrastructure. The same solutions do not work for both. Startups, generally, have "large" amounts of money and "small" amounts of humans. So when you say "based on my specific metrics (money) PaaS doesn't make sense"... uh, yeah, duh. You're not a startup. Being a small business does not make you a startup. Writing code does not make you a startup. Startups burn money like hell in the pursuit of a 100x product-market fit. "Burn Rate" is thrown around a lot as a metric. Do you think the term "burn" was chosen by accident? Startups don't "invest" money. They don't spend it. They BURN it, with the hope that the kindling will explode and they can worry about the damage they caused later.

by hw 8y ago

013a 8y ago

You can pick one sentence out of my comment and tear it apart, or actually read and understand the whole thing. Your choice. Managing servers is something no startup should be doing. Period. If you can SSH into it, you're wasting time on infrastructure that could be spent finding product-market fit. The number of servers isn't the relevant points; its the fact that he's using ANY servers.

hw 8y ago
I get that part. If only all startups could afford managed PaaS services. I might be biased given I've spun up and managed my own infrastructure without much difficulty, and I can see how some startups would prefer spending the dough on PaaS instead of say hiring or putting it towards marketing. I just had an issue with that blanket statement that it's not kosher to be using a server still. It's totally fine for a startup to be managing their own infrastructure if they've done the cost benefit analysis on it.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  Startups can’t afford not to use PaaS. Every second of time they piss away managing their home brew platform is a second they aren’t spending time making their product something people actually want. Managing infrastructure is a solved problem for any startup. Simply spin something up on a heroku-like platform and be done. Anything else is wasting precious time and money.
- 013a 8y ago
  Heroku costs $20/month/dyno. You can probably compare the performance of that to a t3.nano, which is ~$4/month. An engineer costs, lets say $7000/month. Now, all you have to ask is: How much time will the engineer be investing in the infra every month. Lets say you SSH in and update the system packages. 10 minutes? That's $6. Hope nothing goes wrong during the upgrade; remember, you're on the clock. Every minute you spend with that shell open is wasting money. Need to add SSH access for the new guy? Oof, we're gonna have to exchange some SSH keys, that might take 20 minutes. $12. Just got an email from AWS about a new Ubuntu AMI that fixes a security vulnerability... lets plan an upgrade. 1 hour. $30. We want to be more resilient against AWS maintenance downtime on instances, so lets bake an AMI and create an ASG. That's not too hard. Maybe a couple hours. Oh... we just paid the difference for Heroku for an entire year. AND our engineers were able to focus on the product.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
tannhaeuser 8y ago
That obviously depends on how much effort/how expensive "managing servers" via ssh vs. managing cloud infrastructure is. Developing, installing, configuring, and monitoring/troubleshooting apps isn't for free on cloud either (like, not at all).
jwr 8y ago
I disagree. I regularly do a sanity check for my business, and it always turns out that two physical $40/month servers make a lot more sense for me than any PaaS offering, or even just AWS EC2. Guess what, managing a small amount of servers (two) isn't that hard and doesn't take a lot of time, and $40/month gets you really fast CPUs and lots of RAM these days. As always, generalized absolute statements make no sense: everything should be analyzed in context, and based on specific metrics (in my case: money).
- nwsm 8y ago
  Do you know what your business would cost in PaaS monthly, in comparison to the $80 + labor it currently costs?
  - jwr 8y ago
    Yes, significantly more for comparable performance. And then PaaS is not a silver bullet, either: every service has SLOs and downtime.
- 013a 8y ago
  If it doesn't make sense for you, then you're not a startup. That sounds ipso facto, like I'm saying "PaaS is the best option for startups, because if it didn't make sense you're not a startup." but I mean it legitimately. Startups are VERY DIFFERENT from normal businesses, in almost every conceivable way. Great startup engineers do not necessarily make great "normal business" engineers. Great startup infrastructure looks nothing like great normal infrastructure. The same solutions do not work for both. Startups, generally, have "large" amounts of money and "small" amounts of humans. So when you say "based on my specific metrics (money) PaaS doesn't make sense"... uh, yeah, duh. You're not a startup. Being a small business does not make you a startup. Writing code does not make you a startup. Startups burn money like hell in the pursuit of a 100x product-market fit. "Burn Rate" is thrown around a lot as a metric. Do you think the term "burn" was chosen by accident? Startups don't "invest" money. They don't spend it. They BURN it, with the hope that the kindling will explode and they can worry about the damage they caused later.