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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

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.

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.