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What’s the alternative? Devs master a VM/Ops skill set (strictly more work)? Or devs throw code over the wall to an ops team (and progress grinds to a trickle)?

What’s the alternative? Devs master a VM/Ops skill set (strictly more work)? Or devs throw code over the wall to an ops team (and progress grinds to a trickle)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28652561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28652561

scrose 5y ago
Prefacing this with the fact that I’ve only worked at smaller startups(<500 people) Arguably, most of these places do not need dedicated ops teams, nor do they need to host and manage their own infrastructure, yet they do. The most productive startup I worked at used Heroku to bootstrap many of their applications and we didn’t need a single ops person. People were able to switch between teams and follow the same short and standardized process to build and deploy code. They didn’t need to ‘master’ any specialized ops skills and there was typically someone on each team who could quickly debug failing deploys. The least efficient startup I worked at insisted on hosting all their own infra because managed solutions like Heroku were ‘too expensive’. Except we ended up with multi-month long infrastructure rollouts, process additions, changes and infra upgrades that likely cost many orders of magnitude more than managed solutions to implement, with less features than we’d get out of the box with a managed service like Heroku. We also had nowhere near the scale necessary, or headcount, for it to be worth it to self-manage. I’m typically the guy who works on the backend but also gets called in for ops and infrastructure work, and at least for smaller companies that aren’t dealing with hundreds of millions of requests per day, I think the managed route makes way more sense, even if you feel like you’re overspending on infrastructure.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I was comparing Kubernetes to self-managed VMs, not Heroku. Heroku absolutely makes a lot of sense in many cases (small teams, simple use cases, etc).
catlifeonmars 5y ago
Managed platforms. Take Shopify for instance. It’s a platform that allows individuals with very little programming knowledge to build, ship, and operate online retail services, but doesn’t suffer from the segmentation of product lifecycle into dev and ops. The platform user still owns the end to end product lifecycle.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Yeah, I buy that.

scrose 5y ago

Prefacing this with the fact that I’ve only worked at smaller startups(<500 people) Arguably, most of these places do not need dedicated ops teams, nor do they need to host and manage their own infrastructure, yet they do. The most productive startup I worked at used Heroku to bootstrap many of their applications and we didn’t need a single ops person. People were able to switch between teams and follow the same short and standardized process to build and deploy code. They didn’t need to ‘master’ any specialized ops skills and there was typically someone on each team who could quickly debug failing deploys. The least efficient startup I worked at insisted on hosting all their own infra because managed solutions like Heroku were ‘too expensive’. Except we ended up with multi-month long infrastructure rollouts, process additions, changes and infra upgrades that likely cost many orders of magnitude more than managed solutions to implement, with less features than we’d get out of the box with a managed service like Heroku. We also had nowhere near the scale necessary, or headcount, for it to be worth it to self-manage. I’m typically the guy who works on the backend but also gets called in for ops and infrastructure work, and at least for smaller companies that aren’t dealing with hundreds of millions of requests per day, I think the managed route makes way more sense, even if you feel like you’re overspending on infrastructure.

throwaway894345 5y ago
I was comparing Kubernetes to self-managed VMs, not Heroku. Heroku absolutely makes a lot of sense in many cases (small teams, simple use cases, etc).

catlifeonmars 5y ago

Managed platforms. Take Shopify for instance. It’s a platform that allows individuals with very little programming knowledge to build, ship, and operate online retail services, but doesn’t suffer from the segmentation of product lifecycle into dev and ops. The platform user still owns the end to end product lifecycle.

throwaway894345 5y ago
Yeah, I buy that.