3 ms·

You don't necessarily need to plan from scale from the start. Often you just need a few servers, a load balancer, a database, some file storage, internal networ

You don't necessarily need to plan from scale from the start. Often you just need a few servers, a load balancer, a database, some file storage, internal networking, user permissions, and some level of security/firewall. That is very easy to set up on AWS in a day or two, and you don't need all your engineers to simultaneously be devops experts. The scale can happen once you've validated your startup, and when that happens it's a lot easier to just turn on 30 more EC2 instances than to get on the phone with Dell.

thu2111 6y ago
You probably don't get on the phone with Dell. There's a large area in between EC2 and racking your own boxes in your own datacenter. You can buy dedicated machines from OVH or similar firms with lead time of a few days, and it's a very rare firm that can't predict their load a week in advance .. even for a fast growing company. Look at it like this; GitHub mostly ran in their own datacenter using AWS only for spillover capacity. They scaled just fine. Virtually no apps have the problem of runaway growth that they can't handle without instantly provisioned resources.
hw 6y ago
There are some merits to AWS, I can agree with that, and there comes a point where a startup outgrows baremetal / cookie cutter VPS-es, but I disagree with "AWS is trivial" and that it takes a day or two to get things set up. For basic set up like getting a few servers done behind a load balancer and a database - sure - and I'd argue that services like DigitalOcean and Linode are actually easier to set up than AWS for basic services. To actually do more advanced stuff (the thing that AWS is good for) and utilize tools such as Terraform, you'd essentially need to hire engineers that are experts in AWS in addition to engineers who can do devops, as there's only so much "magic" AWS can provide.

thu2111 6y ago

You probably don't get on the phone with Dell. There's a large area in between EC2 and racking your own boxes in your own datacenter. You can buy dedicated machines from OVH or similar firms with lead time of a few days, and it's a very rare firm that can't predict their load a week in advance .. even for a fast growing company. Look at it like this; GitHub mostly ran in their own datacenter using AWS only for spillover capacity. They scaled just fine. Virtually no apps have the problem of runaway growth that they can't handle without instantly provisioned resources.

hw 6y ago

There are some merits to AWS, I can agree with that, and there comes a point where a startup outgrows baremetal / cookie cutter VPS-es, but I disagree with "AWS is trivial" and that it takes a day or two to get things set up. For basic set up like getting a few servers done behind a load balancer and a database - sure - and I'd argue that services like DigitalOcean and Linode are actually easier to set up than AWS for basic services. To actually do more advanced stuff (the thing that AWS is good for) and utilize tools such as Terraform, you'd essentially need to hire engineers that are experts in AWS in addition to engineers who can do devops, as there's only so much "magic" AWS can provide.