Availability is a spectrum. There's a lot of room between "a single VM on a third-tier infrastructure provider" and "google.com". Hell, even "two VMs on a thir

Availability is a spectrum. There's a lot of room between "a single VM on a third-tier infrastructure provider" and "google.com". Hell, even "two VMs on a third-tier infrastructure provider" is better than 2x better availability, because there are discrete events which impact a single VM and don't impact two. Startups should be taking the easiest route possible to Happy Customers. That's the goal. There are two parts to that: "Happy" and "Customers". You need Customers. That's product-market fit. You also need them to be Happy. Availability is a part of that. No, a startup does not need a multi-regional strategy behind redundant global ELBs with edge caching. I never said that. You know what's pretty damn easy though? HEROKU. You spin up multiple dynos and you get multi-AZ redundancy, NO EXTRA WORK. App Engine is the same way. Startups, everywhere, for the love of god, stop spinning up servers. If you can SSH into it, that's a smell. If you HAVE to ssh into it, you're wasting resources. There are so many different "serverless" options out there. Focus on the product. The infrastructure can wait. Its not going anywhere.