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An hour of work put in by any of you reading this is worth several months of hosting for a starter project in an expensive provider like Heroku. Do not invest

An hour of work put in by any of you reading this is worth several months of hosting for a starter project in an expensive provider like Heroku. Do not invest time making sure your service runs for $6 a month if it can run for $50 with 0 hours invested. Invest that time talking to customers and measuring what they do with your service. Most times a few customers pay for the servers. This is just a friendly reminder. I see a lot of comments talking about running backends for cheap.

RussianCow 7y ago
If you're bootstrapping a side project that you aren't confident will make a profit and you have more time than money, I think it's perfectly reasonable to prioritize low operating costs. In all other instances, though, I think you are correct.
- dumbfoundded 7y ago
  Make profitable decisions and be aware of your bankroll.
ajnin 7y ago
This is the conventional wisdom but the more I think about it the less I agree. I think we have a duty to minimize resource usage and waste in general. The part of energy used by IT infrastructure is constantly increasing and has a significant impact on the environment. Let's put your statement on another perspective : it is worth investing a few days/weeks of work of a low power machine (a human) to reduce significantly the long-term power usage of a high-powered machine (a computer or cluster thereof).
- thereisnospork 7y ago
  > a low power machine (a human) to reduce significantly the long-term power usage of a high-powered machine (a computer or cluster thereof). That seems a sad view on the value of a person. Shouldn't the whole point of technology and infrastructure be to allow a person to use more resources so as to better[0] allocate their limited time?
  - filoleg 7y ago
    A lot of people tend to not consider time invested as a measurable resource, and that is a sad thing indeed, as that is one resource that can only be spent.
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    You're entirely missing the point. If I'm spending a month to optimize some code so that it is 25% faster, these gains don't go away again once I'm done optimizing. They stay in the product for months or years. And this is where the effort pays off.
- BoorishBears 7y ago
  ... 1 kwh on the power grid produces 0.9884 lbs of greenhouse gas: https://carbonfund.org/calculation-methods/ https://carbonfund.org/calculation-methods/ 0.1163 kWh of human energy produces 0.64 lbs of greenhouse gas: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/running-a-marathon-how-green-are-our-two-legs/2012/10/15/f8efdfd2-114c-11e2-a16b-2c110031514a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/runni... If we even humor this sentiment (I don't buy that we should, 5$ vs 50$ of compute is not why we're struggling with climate change. Compute period is 10% of all electricity production, we're not going reduce that with a few hours of optimization here and there.. It's way too late to be taking such half-measures seriously), the math doesn't work out. - Thinking about climate change on a personal level is positive, but I also feel our efforts should be grounded in reality, not just things that feel good. The hours you spend optimizing your bootstrapped service to reduce it's CO2 footprint... could be spent in plenty of other activities that actually reduce your carbon footprint.
  - robomartin 7y ago
    The level of misinformation, misplaced priorities and uninformed conclusions in climate change has reached staggering levels. We have people who don't believe it's real (which is silly) and, at the other end of the scale, people who believe we can actually fix it in 50 years (which is just as silly, even 100 years is silly). People are convinced they "know" the "truth" without even bothering to throw a few numbers at a spreadsheet to see if what they think they know aligns with any imaginable version of a non-science-fiction reality. I am very concerned that politics and ignorance is driving this far more than real science.
  - vonseel 7y ago
    * Compute period is 10% of all electricity production* You found stats on that? I’m surprised
    - BoorishBears 7y ago
      Actually the figure I found was for "all ICT", if we mean compute to be data centers (I did) , it's even lower: 2% projected to reach 8% in a decade (https://fortune.com/2019/09/18/internet-cloud-server-data-center-energy-consumption-renewable-coal/amp/ https://fortune.com/2019/09/18/internet-cloud-server-data-ce...)
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  Sure but now you are wasting significant human capital reinventing the wheel with substantially worse results. So using your math, you’ve got humans, which have high environmental costs in order to... well... live... wasting their life and consuming tons of resources doing something that was done better for cheaper. Humans cost tons of money to operate. More than data centers or anything else. Don’t waste them on stupid projects like writing shitty versions of AWS. Your own logic should lead you to conclude all the people wasting expensive human lives reinventing javascript frameworks, deployment systems, cloud orchestration systems, database systems and AWS... these are the folks doing true harm to the environment. It is much better for the planet to lock yourself into AWS, Azure, or google cloud and exploit the shit out of everything they do than it is to piss away incredibly expensive resources building your own. And I am more than happy to boldly assert if you are working on a project that aims to re-invent AWS for your company... you are a waste of human capital.
  - somehnguy 7y ago
    As someone who sort of held the view that the incredible inefficiencies in modern computing and 'cloud stuff' was a net negative on the environment, thanks for this comment. I still don't think mindlessly throwing extremely inefficient stuff into a datacenter for no reason is a great thing to do but this gives me a lot better perspective as to why it isn't so black and white of a thing. I forget sometimes that humans have a very high cost to operate too.
- ako 7y ago
  The best way to reduce usage is to not build and run what people do not want.
bcrosby95 7y ago
Hours aren't really fungible if you're paid salary though. I can't decide to work another hour to earn another $100.
- zenlikethat 7y ago
  So skip dinner out this weekend and use that $100 for the project ;) Most software engineers make plenty to budget for infrastructure at a side project.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
keyle 7y ago
The fact is, getting the backend running on cheap is far more fun than chasing and talking to people.
- nine_k 7y ago
  Depending on who you are: an engineer or a businessman. A startup is a business; a side project may be pure hobby.
- ako 7y ago
  The fact is, that is not a fact, but an opinion.
  - keyle 7y ago
    Very true, I guess I woke up in this world where facts are treated as opinions.
herval 7y ago
A friend of mine recently launched a side-project that does heavy processing of audio. He decided to invest ~2-5 hours properly setting up auto-scaling, a job queue, etc, before releasing v1. Fast-forward two days later, his service and a competitor were both featured on Product Hunt. He's now making a profit on the service, as he managed to scale it up very fast, while the competitor buckled and completely lost momentum. If you're talking about spending _a long time_ preparing a perfect infra, then your argument makes sense. Spending a few hours? It's both a great learning exercise and can literally save your project, so why not?
- thiagocsf 7y ago
  Because you don’t have to. The few hours you used on infrastructure can be better used fixing a bug, polishing/adding a feature or even giving yourself a break so you can be better focused the next day. A Heroku-like platform will literally do the scaling for you. The non-financial cost is that you need to develop your application in-line with their framework/platform. If you make this decision at the start, this cost in practically nil.
  - meesterdude 7y ago
    This is how I see it as well. Start making cookies with the kitchen oven before planning to start a bakery. Heroku lets you do both.
- hartator 7y ago
  Auto-scaling doesn’t take 3-5 hours to set up. Or come work for us!
  - pojntfx 7y ago
    With a Kubernetes autoscaler, this takes you ~20 Minutes to setup pod autoscaling. If you run your k8s on say GKE, setting up node autoscaling is another 5 Minutes.
    - nrb 7y ago
tluyben2 7y ago
> $6 a month if it can run for $50 with 0 hours invested With the risk of sounding like a broken record: yes in such a case it is better but that is often not the case at hand; this exact argument is used for spending $500/mo after optimizing the software vs $50k/mo autoscaling with ‘0 hours’ invested (between ‘ because ofcourse it takes a lot of time to even get that working, but, for many programmers, it is apparently easier work?). A few weeks ago I commented here while optimizing a Laravel cloud install, now I am working on a Clojure one. Client is spending $28k/mo on aws, especially Dynamo and the rest on ELB. Rewriting to Postgresql standard and the dynamo part to postgres columnstore and adding proper indexes has the lastest stress tests down to a few 100$/mo they will spend when they launch this. The $28k is spent using exactly your argument, and like most of these projects like this I do, it was quite a lot less than 28k (1 month hosting) to optimize this (which had us rewrite a lot of spaghetti from dynamo to psql). So yes, in some cases you are right, I would say when cloud hosting pops over 3k (especially if sudden), I would hire a me to have a bit of check to see if you are not burning money for nothing.
- philliphaydon 7y ago
  Dynamo is costing 28k? I'm a bit confused. What's the cost from Dynamo to Postgres?
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    Not only Dynamo; the total bill. And Dynamo completely abused while Postgres used as it should be and tuned for what they are doing. I am not saying Dynamo could not be used or tuned for this work, but Postgres was a better fix and more far more portable ofcourse.
    - philliphaydon 7y ago
      Ah I'm just curious about the $$ cost, I 2 RDS PG instances running on t3.medium, one is 30gb never goes over 10% cpu, the other is ~150gb and never goes over 50% cpu. I also have some dynamo stuff for some session management and wonder if it would be better to just shove it in postgres. So I read your comment as $28k dynamo to $100 postgresql.

RussianCow 7y ago

If you're bootstrapping a side project that you aren't confident will make a profit and you have more time than money, I think it's perfectly reasonable to prioritize low operating costs. In all other instances, though, I think you are correct.

dumbfoundded 7y ago
Make profitable decisions and be aware of your bankroll.

ajnin 7y ago

This is the conventional wisdom but the more I think about it the less I agree. I think we have a duty to minimize resource usage and waste in general. The part of energy used by IT infrastructure is constantly increasing and has a significant impact on the environment. Let's put your statement on another perspective : it is worth investing a few days/weeks of work of a low power machine (a human) to reduce significantly the long-term power usage of a high-powered machine (a computer or cluster thereof).

thereisnospork 7y ago
> a low power machine (a human) to reduce significantly the long-term power usage of a high-powered machine (a computer or cluster thereof). That seems a sad view on the value of a person. Shouldn't the whole point of technology and infrastructure be to allow a person to use more resources so as to better[0] allocate their limited time?
- filoleg 7y ago
  A lot of people tend to not consider time invested as a measurable resource, and that is a sad thing indeed, as that is one resource that can only be spent.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  You're entirely missing the point. If I'm spending a month to optimize some code so that it is 25% faster, these gains don't go away again once I'm done optimizing. They stay in the product for months or years. And this is where the effort pays off.
BoorishBears 7y ago
... 1 kwh on the power grid produces 0.9884 lbs of greenhouse gas: https://carbonfund.org/calculation-methods/ https://carbonfund.org/calculation-methods/ 0.1163 kWh of human energy produces 0.64 lbs of greenhouse gas: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/running-a-marathon-how-green-are-our-two-legs/2012/10/15/f8efdfd2-114c-11e2-a16b-2c110031514a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/runni... If we even humor this sentiment (I don't buy that we should, 5$ vs 50$ of compute is not why we're struggling with climate change. Compute period is 10% of all electricity production, we're not going reduce that with a few hours of optimization here and there.. It's way too late to be taking such half-measures seriously), the math doesn't work out. - Thinking about climate change on a personal level is positive, but I also feel our efforts should be grounded in reality, not just things that feel good. The hours you spend optimizing your bootstrapped service to reduce it's CO2 footprint... could be spent in plenty of other activities that actually reduce your carbon footprint.
- robomartin 7y ago
  The level of misinformation, misplaced priorities and uninformed conclusions in climate change has reached staggering levels. We have people who don't believe it's real (which is silly) and, at the other end of the scale, people who believe we can actually fix it in 50 years (which is just as silly, even 100 years is silly). People are convinced they "know" the "truth" without even bothering to throw a few numbers at a spreadsheet to see if what they think they know aligns with any imaginable version of a non-science-fiction reality. I am very concerned that politics and ignorance is driving this far more than real science.
- vonseel 7y ago
  * Compute period is 10% of all electricity production* You found stats on that? I’m surprised
  - BoorishBears 7y ago
    Actually the figure I found was for "all ICT", if we mean compute to be data centers (I did) , it's even lower: 2% projected to reach 8% in a decade (https://fortune.com/2019/09/18/internet-cloud-server-data-center-energy-consumption-renewable-coal/amp/ https://fortune.com/2019/09/18/internet-cloud-server-data-ce...)
spookthesunset 7y ago
Sure but now you are wasting significant human capital reinventing the wheel with substantially worse results. So using your math, you’ve got humans, which have high environmental costs in order to... well... live... wasting their life and consuming tons of resources doing something that was done better for cheaper. Humans cost tons of money to operate. More than data centers or anything else. Don’t waste them on stupid projects like writing shitty versions of AWS. Your own logic should lead you to conclude all the people wasting expensive human lives reinventing javascript frameworks, deployment systems, cloud orchestration systems, database systems and AWS... these are the folks doing true harm to the environment. It is much better for the planet to lock yourself into AWS, Azure, or google cloud and exploit the shit out of everything they do than it is to piss away incredibly expensive resources building your own. And I am more than happy to boldly assert if you are working on a project that aims to re-invent AWS for your company... you are a waste of human capital.
- somehnguy 7y ago
  As someone who sort of held the view that the incredible inefficiencies in modern computing and 'cloud stuff' was a net negative on the environment, thanks for this comment. I still don't think mindlessly throwing extremely inefficient stuff into a datacenter for no reason is a great thing to do but this gives me a lot better perspective as to why it isn't so black and white of a thing. I forget sometimes that humans have a very high cost to operate too.
ako 7y ago
The best way to reduce usage is to not build and run what people do not want.

bcrosby95 7y ago

Hours aren't really fungible if you're paid salary though. I can't decide to work another hour to earn another $100.

zenlikethat 7y ago
So skip dinner out this weekend and use that $100 for the project ;) Most software engineers make plenty to budget for infrastructure at a side project.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

keyle 7y ago

The fact is, getting the backend running on cheap is far more fun than chasing and talking to people.

nine_k 7y ago
Depending on who you are: an engineer or a businessman. A startup is a business; a side project may be pure hobby.
ako 7y ago
The fact is, that is not a fact, but an opinion.
- keyle 7y ago
  Very true, I guess I woke up in this world where facts are treated as opinions.

herval 7y ago

A friend of mine recently launched a side-project that does heavy processing of audio. He decided to invest ~2-5 hours properly setting up auto-scaling, a job queue, etc, before releasing v1. Fast-forward two days later, his service and a competitor were both featured on Product Hunt. He's now making a profit on the service, as he managed to scale it up very fast, while the competitor buckled and completely lost momentum. If you're talking about spending _a long time_ preparing a perfect infra, then your argument makes sense. Spending a few hours? It's both a great learning exercise and can literally save your project, so why not?

thiagocsf 7y ago
Because you don’t have to. The few hours you used on infrastructure can be better used fixing a bug, polishing/adding a feature or even giving yourself a break so you can be better focused the next day. A Heroku-like platform will literally do the scaling for you. The non-financial cost is that you need to develop your application in-line with their framework/platform. If you make this decision at the start, this cost in practically nil.
- meesterdude 7y ago
  This is how I see it as well. Start making cookies with the kitchen oven before planning to start a bakery. Heroku lets you do both.
hartator 7y ago
Auto-scaling doesn’t take 3-5 hours to set up. Or come work for us!
- pojntfx 7y ago
  With a Kubernetes autoscaler, this takes you ~20 Minutes to setup pod autoscaling. If you run your k8s on say GKE, setting up node autoscaling is another 5 Minutes.
  - nrb 7y ago

tluyben2 7y ago

> $6 a month if it can run for $50 with 0 hours invested With the risk of sounding like a broken record: yes in such a case it is better but that is often not the case at hand; this exact argument is used for spending $500/mo after optimizing the software vs $50k/mo autoscaling with ‘0 hours’ invested (between ‘ because ofcourse it takes a lot of time to even get that working, but, for many programmers, it is apparently easier work?). A few weeks ago I commented here while optimizing a Laravel cloud install, now I am working on a Clojure one. Client is spending $28k/mo on aws, especially Dynamo and the rest on ELB. Rewriting to Postgresql standard and the dynamo part to postgres columnstore and adding proper indexes has the lastest stress tests down to a few 100$/mo they will spend when they launch this. The $28k is spent using exactly your argument, and like most of these projects like this I do, it was quite a lot less than 28k (1 month hosting) to optimize this (which had us rewrite a lot of spaghetti from dynamo to psql). So yes, in some cases you are right, I would say when cloud hosting pops over 3k (especially if sudden), I would hire a me to have a bit of check to see if you are not burning money for nothing.

philliphaydon 7y ago
Dynamo is costing 28k? I'm a bit confused. What's the cost from Dynamo to Postgres?
- tluyben2 7y ago
  Not only Dynamo; the total bill. And Dynamo completely abused while Postgres used as it should be and tuned for what they are doing. I am not saying Dynamo could not be used or tuned for this work, but Postgres was a better fix and more far more portable ofcourse.
  - philliphaydon 7y ago
    Ah I'm just curious about the $$ cost, I 2 RDS PG instances running on t3.medium, one is 30gb never goes over 10% cpu, the other is ~150gb and never goes over 50% cpu. I also have some dynamo stuff for some session management and wonder if it would be better to just shove it in postgres. So I read your comment as $28k dynamo to $100 postgresql.