> Except in my experience it’s not two years, it’s two months. And I can set up two micro instances with terraform in less than an hour. Fucking that. Only ski

> Except in my experience it’s not two years, it’s two months. And I can set up two micro instances with terraform in less than an hour. Fucking that. Only skip the basics entirely if you don't plan to hire anyone in those 5 months (no or inadequate tests, no scripted way to create a dev instance? You just cut their first-two-months productivity in half.) and are 1000% sure no-one's gonna horrifically break prod, and don't mind dev velocity dropping ~10% (and/or bug rate and "of shit it's on fire" calls increasing alarmingly) every month over the next 6 months. There's a lot of room between "we need a k8s cluster with autoscaling, three kinds of databases, lambdas, blah blah" and "LOL develop on prod YOLO!" IME this kind of thing never gets added in month 4 because there's already too much tech debt. Add it in month 1. A couple days and 10s of dollars/month setting up or buying tools & services to keep your team confidently moving fast over the next half-year is some of the most valuable work you'll do. [EDIT] oh and in the specific case of Infra as Code or fully-scripted deployments, around month 4 when your stuff's a bit more complicated it makes your answer "yeah, give me these couple pieces of info and put me in touch with one of their tech guys and I'll have it done by lunch tomorrow" instead of "uhhhh... fuck... uh.... two weeks? Hopefully?" when your sales guy says "we've got a huge deal almost closed but they need our thing hosted on govcloud/on-prem/European servers, can we do that?"