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This is a startup/business/tech forum, I am a founder of a 20 person business (hiring 7 more) that does this part-time because it's very low maintenance. I am f

This is a startup/business/tech forum, I am a founder of a 20 person business (hiring 7 more) that does this part-time because it's very low maintenance. I am finally hiring a devops person to handle the command line side of things, though I am still pretty happy to dink around at the datacenter every once in a while. I taught myself as I went. I save about 10x over AWS. I would likely make the same decision today if I was starting from scratch, as I did 12+ years ago when I first started doing infra for our small website. Infra is not magical, it's probably the easiest part of my job. Way easier than messing around with JS dependencies, way easier than troubleshooting a segfault in a C extension for our Rails app, and way easier than marketing, business management, accounting, interacting with legal, etc. And takes less time too.

shiftpgdn 6y ago
I think the trouble is a lot of developers have little to no insight into the business side of things and treat that initial AWS credit + follow-on VC funding as this magic money fountain. If you're a founder you understand a dollar saved is a dollar that keeps your doors open longer or a dollar into your pocket.
kroolik 6y ago
I'm glad you've taught yourself infra things as you needed. But, you see, this is an anecdotal proof (like the whole article, anyway). Learning infra is not the case all the time. Some companies choose AWS (or any other) for speed. We can, again, argue but the argument is my PoV vs yours, or any other new commenter. Although I know how to maintain small infra: bunch of vms, reverse proxy and an rdbms, I'm not really into hosting HA Rabbitmq or Postgres myself. There is a ton of problems and configuration options coming from replication and consistency I would rather pay premium to people who have done it in the past. I want my team to build solutions solving customers problems instead of fixing bugs in our replication code. It's all about perspective, I guess we can't reach a definitive answer for one or the other.
- anonfornoreason 6y ago
  If your team cannot manage a postgres, rabbitmq, etc install, then you need to find higher caliber employees.
  - kroolik 6y ago
    You would rather have a team of specialists for every piece of technology you have. I'd rather have my team members not focus on nuissances of database replication, and instead solve our customers' problems. Looks like both of us are successful. Why does it have to be that there is only one way to success?
    - anonfornoreason 6y ago
      There isn't just one way, but from what I can tell AWS works great for the really small and the really big, and is a massive waste of money for the in-between. They have run an amazingly effective marketing campaign to make everyone feel like they are missing out if they aren't using it. The learning curve for working with AWS is similar to the learning curve of working on bare metal. It honestly does not take a specialist to use MySQL, Postgres, etc. They are really quite easy to make a HA turnkey solution. It's as easy as learning how to effectively use an amazon service. We aren't talking about the days where you had to shard out which was a big pain in the ass, because machines are cheap now with 128 physical cores, 1tb of memory, massive fast storage, etc. You can run the nastiest largest database on a single machine and achieve a pretty large scale doing it. One of these paths costs about $2500 a month with server purchase amortization, and on the other about $20,000 per month. Either way I need someone to manage it (unless you are talking heroku level of turn-key, then up that $20k a month to $50k a month).

shiftpgdn 6y ago

I think the trouble is a lot of developers have little to no insight into the business side of things and treat that initial AWS credit + follow-on VC funding as this magic money fountain. If you're a founder you understand a dollar saved is a dollar that keeps your doors open longer or a dollar into your pocket.

kroolik 6y ago

I'm glad you've taught yourself infra things as you needed. But, you see, this is an anecdotal proof (like the whole article, anyway). Learning infra is not the case all the time. Some companies choose AWS (or any other) for speed. We can, again, argue but the argument is my PoV vs yours, or any other new commenter. Although I know how to maintain small infra: bunch of vms, reverse proxy and an rdbms, I'm not really into hosting HA Rabbitmq or Postgres myself. There is a ton of problems and configuration options coming from replication and consistency I would rather pay premium to people who have done it in the past. I want my team to build solutions solving customers problems instead of fixing bugs in our replication code. It's all about perspective, I guess we can't reach a definitive answer for one or the other.

anonfornoreason 6y ago
If your team cannot manage a postgres, rabbitmq, etc install, then you need to find higher caliber employees.
- kroolik 6y ago
  You would rather have a team of specialists for every piece of technology you have. I'd rather have my team members not focus on nuissances of database replication, and instead solve our customers' problems. Looks like both of us are successful. Why does it have to be that there is only one way to success?
  - anonfornoreason 6y ago
    There isn't just one way, but from what I can tell AWS works great for the really small and the really big, and is a massive waste of money for the in-between. They have run an amazingly effective marketing campaign to make everyone feel like they are missing out if they aren't using it. The learning curve for working with AWS is similar to the learning curve of working on bare metal. It honestly does not take a specialist to use MySQL, Postgres, etc. They are really quite easy to make a HA turnkey solution. It's as easy as learning how to effectively use an amazon service. We aren't talking about the days where you had to shard out which was a big pain in the ass, because machines are cheap now with 128 physical cores, 1tb of memory, massive fast storage, etc. You can run the nastiest largest database on a single machine and achieve a pretty large scale doing it. One of these paths costs about $2500 a month with server purchase amortization, and on the other about $20,000 per month. Either way I need someone to manage it (unless you are talking heroku level of turn-key, then up that $20k a month to $50k a month).