9 ms·

Good. Both Google and Amazon are barreling down the path of democratizing scale and infrastructure with their cloud offerings. It's never been easier to reach m

• sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  I hope so
• greenthrow 4y ago
  99.9% of startups never have a need for more scale/infrastructure than a single VPS. Maybe a dedicated server. Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.
  • ptero 4y ago
    This. Cloud is great when a startup hits an unexpected growth spurt and can scale infra without getting distracted from the core mission. It is not cheap, but it may be worth it. But this is a fairly narrow use case and until hitting limitations of a couple of VPSes, moving to the cloud does not make sense for most startups. My 2c.
  • no_wizard 4y ago
    Depends on the cloud. Looking at Supabase, I think it would be a good choice for most startups[0] and it will scale as the business does, but it removes most of the overhead of getting started. It has Auth, A database, Lambda Support, CDN and File Storage. Baked in are REST APIs and GraphQL APIs out of the box. Its reasonably well priced and there's little friction on setting up and far, far less to worry about hosting wise. No need to setup a box and maintain updates etc, and it can scale if the business really does scale. I don't think all cloud propositions are the same. AWS, GCP (maybe sans Firebase?) and Azure definitely have their place but I don't think they're great for the average startup. [0]: Even medium sized and enterprise businesses could leverage it. Its all powered by Postgres at the end of the day
    • greenthrow 4y ago
      Yeah but we are talking about startups. Brand new ones. They have no customers. Let alone enough customers to necessitate cloud scaling.
      • no_wizard 4y ago
        Gotta build the prototype on something eventually. It’s a solid OOTB tech stack. Lets you focus on building the business with peace of mind. Not fiddling with servers etc.
      • fijiaarone 4y ago
        For the past several years, “startup” meant at least 5 years in operation with over $1 billion valuation.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • fakedang 4y ago
        I've used Supabase for some production level projects, and it's seriously a very good starting point which you can scale up to mid-tier levels. Brand new ones with no customers can easily leverage their free tier.
  • SassyGrapefruit 4y ago
    > But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more. Having done this several times I can definitively say given my experience it's best to start in the cloud with a cloud native architecture. I can run a fully containerized application in ECS or EKS for a few hundred bucks a month. Why would I incur all the costs and limitations of a VPS or even worse a server I have to look after myself? How much can I really save? $50 a month maybe less? A long time ago when I was working a major telecomm provider I had the privilege of working with a great software mentor. He instilled in me the lesson of knowing approximately where you are going to land and not do anything now that would jeopardize that landing. If I was a CTO at a greenfield startup. I would insist we deploy on a PaaS that supports serverless, object storage, and container orchestration. We would recognize and enforce well accepted patterns that will not impair our ability to scale later. There is plenty I can do to keep the costs low(most importantly turning things off) then when I need to scale up its as easy as turning a knob.
    • greenthrow 4y ago
      You can get a VPS for like $5/month. So you can save near enough hundreds of dollars a month.
      • sanderjd 4y ago
        So, say you're saving $2500 a year? That seems pretty cheap for an option to scale up without fundamentally changing your operational architecture. The bigger question mark than the money, I think, is whether this scale up approach actually works, or whether you end up fundamentally changing everything anyway. In my experience it's a mixed bag. There are some advantages, but it also isn't a panacea, and certainly isn't as easy as turning that dynos knob on heroku was. But at the end of the day, I land on it being worth it for a business (though not for a hobby). But it isn't a no-brainer.
      • treis 4y ago
        A couple hours of engineer time per month. Maybe 5 if we're being generous.
      • 4y ago
  • Salgat 4y ago
    I disagree, mostly because if your product takes off, that single day or few weeks where the adoption rate sky rockets may be your defining moment for your startup, and scaling up on the cloud is trivial in comparison. Remember, when you're that small, the expenses of the cloud vs dedicated hardware is tiny compared to your employee expenses anyways.
    • mattmanser 4y ago
      Twitter used to go down regularly in the early days. Reddit did too, even years after it became popular. Facebook I can't be certain now, but I think it would break in the early days. And even right now today, ChatGPT regularly displays "too busy" messages. i.e. this is absolute tosh. And if you know what you're doing you can take something down overnight and put it on a dedicated server.
      • anonylizard 4y ago
        "ChatGPT regularly displays "too busy" messages." ChatGPT scaled from 0 users to 100 million in 2 months. Probably millions online at any given second. Its too busy, because it literally exhausted all the GPUs Azure has as its disposal. Without the Cloud, scaling ChatGPT would have been impossible. It would have been nowhere near its current success. Remember that GPT3 was released to the public in Mid 2022, had no public reaction, because it was put behind a paywall. ChatGPT had to be free, and able to cope with the load, to be successful.
        • mattmanser 4y ago
          False. It is not coping with the load. It is successful. Therefore, it did not have to be able to cope with the load to be successful. All you did is illustrate my point.
          • Salgat 4y ago
            That's because ChatGPT was able to sustain service past the point of mass adoption. You're not going to scale to millions of users in a short timespan with dedicated hardware.
• jejeyyy77 4y ago
  cloud infrastructure was never the limiting factor.
  • duxup 4y ago
    I think it was in a way. Having an old school style IT structure was a pain. Maintaining your severs, networking gear if needed, OS updates ... on and on. For very small teams (maybe not the well funded start ups) that could eat a lot of time and trouble.
    • fijiaarone 4y ago
      You used to be able to scale up to millions of users in less time than you could memorize all the AWS acronyms, and with lower hardware and bandwidth costs to boot. It’s true that it would take a couple weeks to order all the hardware and a couple more to install and configure it, but that’s about the same amount of time you spend writing all the terraform and Kubernetes scripts and configuring cloudformation and VPCs and IAMs.
      • oblio 4y ago
        Yeah, but then you wouldn't have high availability to the same level, for example. I mean, you could, but then tack on another 100 non-AWS acronyms to your on-premise solution.
  • nrb 4y ago
    Looking back 20-30 years, it absolutely was a primary limiting factor. Massive capital outlays were required to serve the kind of traffic you can get with the free tier of modern cloud infra providers.
    • bluGill 4y ago
      That depends on what you are doing. Serving static websites needs a great pipe, but doesn't need much CPU.
• almet 4y ago
  Aren't startup made to be bought by the tech giants? Until there is a shift in their goals, I can't see thé gafam losing here.
  • bluGill 4y ago
    Some are, but a lot of them are also made to be successful long term companies. Small business is still a large employer overall. Some businesses need to be very big, and if you want to be "filthy rich" you have to be in one of those. However you can be nicely wealthy at a small company.
    • almet 4y ago
      I still have a hard time understanding what's going on with startups : the power of money makes it too attractive to sell and "call it a life" I guess. That's why even if they don't plan on doing this, startup might actually accept being bought. I guess.
  • nick__m 4y ago
    a thé gafam : it use to taste really good but now it taste awfully bad, yet we cannot stop drinking it!
• arbuge 4y ago
  > Both Google and Amazon are barreling down the path of democratizing scale and infrastructure with their cloud offerings. It's never been easier to reach millions of users in a short amount of time with your product. The second statement does not follow from the first. What is true (partly because of the first statement) is that building is now easier than ever. Precisely because of that, however, rising above all the noise and reaching millions of users is now arguably harder than it was previously.
  • throwaway894345 4y ago
    Presumably "it's never been easier" means "the technology is no longer the bottleneck".
  • didgetmaster 4y ago
    The key word in the phrase is 'reach'. If by 'reach' you mean the equivalent of getting an email into someone's account, then the statement is true. You can easily spam millions of email addresses for pennies. You can get ad space on lots of browsers. You can cold call millions of people with automated systems. On the other hand if by 'reach' you mean actually getting someone's physical and mental attention, then it can be harder than ever. Your message gets filtered out or swallowed up in the sea of other messages and ignored either by technology or by the users themselves. It is like those pictures of NY Times Square (or any corner in Asia) where you have 10,000 billboards of all shapes and sizes all flashing some marketing message. It is easier than ever to buy a few seconds or minutes of ad time on one of them. It is harder than ever to get the passing crowd to take notice of your message when it is drowned out by all the others.
  • fhd2 4y ago
    True. So laid off marketers are probably more successful founders than laid off engineers these days.
• Salgat 4y ago
  I don't understand why Google and Amazon would invest all this money in these employees building up their tech and tribal knowledge just to lay them off. Do these companies not expect to grow in the future? Seems like just freezing hiring for a year or two would save you more money in the long run rather than having to rehire and rebuild all this expertise.
  • shen 4y ago
    Unfortunately the market does not work on a year or two timelines.
    • b112 4y ago
      These companies still have more employees than just before the pandemic.
    • _old_dude_ 4y ago
      There is a concept of internal layoff to invent, where a part of the workforce as to apply to a different teams, being fired from the previous one and hire by the next one. For the anecdote, i know someone that was let go by IBM and hire by RedHat the same month two years ago.
    • ornornor 4y ago
      “1 or 2 years?? Are you planning on living for ever??? That’s like 4 to 8 quarters!”
  • deelowe 4y ago
    > Do these companies not expect to grow in the future? Yes and wages were outpacing that growth, so as soon as someone took the first step, all the big tech companies piled on in short order. And, low and beyond, offers appear to be down right now. Mission accomplished?
    • dmix 4y ago
      On hiring outpaced need for employees or ROI COVID era was a hiring boom. Most of the companies I saw doing layoffs still have significantly larger employment numbers than pre-COVID.
• andsoitis 4y ago
  > OpenAI challenging search Not even close.