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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 Paa

by 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 jwr 8y ago

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.