4 ms·

There are a HUGE number of startups that would have had a massively harder time if they had to roll their own infra. Who cares if the companies eventually have

There are a HUGE number of startups that would have had a massively harder time if they had to roll their own infra. Who cares if the companies eventually have to move off? (Though even Netflix seems ok with it overall for now). There are a ton of services that just wouldn't exist otherwise

jokethrowaway 3y ago
I disagree, at early startup scale you don't need much, you just buy a better VPS when you need to scale up Learning aws vs learning how to operate a vps are of comparable complexity It took me less then a day to setup infra for my startup (more than 10 years ago)
- throwaway50182 3y ago
  If you're just running VPS on the big clouds, you're not going to get much advantage out of it, indeed. But tell me what third tier cheap provider has managed scale-to-zero-or-infinity functions? Managed storage with S3-like API? Where can I get an API gateway cheaper than Amazon? What about managed databases? These tools allow me to develop insanely scalable software incredibly easily. Agreed - all the big clouds are very expensive VPS hostings. Don't use it for that.
  - pleoxy 3y ago
    You get portability. Which the functions do not provide. Open source solutions have a longer career utility than proprietary offerings. I remember when NetWare certs were all the rage. Useless now. I remember msce. But if you learned open tools 35 years ago instead... You get the picture. You can scale from 1 thread 512MB RAM, to 500 threads and 12TB of RAM (off the shelf). Which is good enough for almost everyone who isn't planet scale. Auto scaling also comes with auto billing. Oops, your accidental infinite loop spawning functions has bankrupted your company. You don't have that risk starting with a VPS.
    - throwaway50182 3y ago
      I agree completely, but the argument remains the same - there's not much utility in using the big clouds as VPS providers, and it's definitely costly to do so.
      - pleoxy 3y ago
        That part of true. Using EC2 at AWS now and it's much more expensive than vultr, Hetzner, or akamai cloud.
  - jddj 3y ago
    > Managed storage with S3-like API? What's third tier here? Pretty much all of them offer S3 compatibility it's basically table stakes
- vikramkr 3y ago
  Sorry not sure if I'm missing something obvious but isn't a VPS gonna be hosted by a cloud provider? How would that be an alternative to using the cloud?
pleoxy 3y ago
It's not that hard. Particularly for simple deployments, which a startup should have or they are doing it wrong.
- vikramkr 3y ago
  How would you do it for a simple webapp? Genuine question
  - pleoxy 3y ago
    Ingress that handles SSL. nginx, or caddy. Then stand up your app server behind that on the same VM. Database can be on the same or different VM. I try to not use anything else if I can avoid it on a new project. Ingress gives you the ability to load balance and is threaded and will scale with network transfer and cpu. Database should scale with a bump in VM specs as well, CPU and disk IOPS. If you keep your app server stateless you can simply multiply it for the number of copies you need for your load. Systemd can keep your app server running, it you docker it up and use that
    - devbent 3y ago
      > If you keep your app server stateless you can simply multiply it for the number of copies you need for your load. This right here so many times over. I'm not going to spend time worrying about scaling, I'm going spend time figuring out how to make stuff stateless.
      - pleoxy 3y ago
        Shove your state into the database. Done.
    - vikramkr 3y ago
      No that's all fine, I mean physically, where would I put a server and stuff if we didn't have cloud providers? I'd need to pay an isp for an IP address and maybe port forward and stuff like that right? I don't get why I wouldn't just do what you mentioned on a five dollar digital ocean droplet or an ec2 instance or whatever, the cloud still seems orders of magnitude easier to get off the ground.
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Renting a server and using standard commodity open source software and standard (outsourced) sysadmins is way cheaper and faster than learning and dealing with all the proprietary AWS and Azure junk. (Probably also less reliable than "cloud", but who cares if you're a startup.)

jokethrowaway 3y ago

I disagree, at early startup scale you don't need much, you just buy a better VPS when you need to scale up Learning aws vs learning how to operate a vps are of comparable complexity It took me less then a day to setup infra for my startup (more than 10 years ago)

throwaway50182 3y ago
If you're just running VPS on the big clouds, you're not going to get much advantage out of it, indeed. But tell me what third tier cheap provider has managed scale-to-zero-or-infinity functions? Managed storage with S3-like API? Where can I get an API gateway cheaper than Amazon? What about managed databases? These tools allow me to develop insanely scalable software incredibly easily. Agreed - all the big clouds are very expensive VPS hostings. Don't use it for that.
- pleoxy 3y ago
  You get portability. Which the functions do not provide. Open source solutions have a longer career utility than proprietary offerings. I remember when NetWare certs were all the rage. Useless now. I remember msce. But if you learned open tools 35 years ago instead... You get the picture. You can scale from 1 thread 512MB RAM, to 500 threads and 12TB of RAM (off the shelf). Which is good enough for almost everyone who isn't planet scale. Auto scaling also comes with auto billing. Oops, your accidental infinite loop spawning functions has bankrupted your company. You don't have that risk starting with a VPS.
  - throwaway50182 3y ago
    I agree completely, but the argument remains the same - there's not much utility in using the big clouds as VPS providers, and it's definitely costly to do so.
    - pleoxy 3y ago
      That part of true. Using EC2 at AWS now and it's much more expensive than vultr, Hetzner, or akamai cloud.
- jddj 3y ago
  > Managed storage with S3-like API? What's third tier here? Pretty much all of them offer S3 compatibility it's basically table stakes
vikramkr 3y ago
Sorry not sure if I'm missing something obvious but isn't a VPS gonna be hosted by a cloud provider? How would that be an alternative to using the cloud?

pleoxy 3y ago

It's not that hard. Particularly for simple deployments, which a startup should have or they are doing it wrong.

vikramkr 3y ago
How would you do it for a simple webapp? Genuine question
- pleoxy 3y ago
  Ingress that handles SSL. nginx, or caddy. Then stand up your app server behind that on the same VM. Database can be on the same or different VM. I try to not use anything else if I can avoid it on a new project. Ingress gives you the ability to load balance and is threaded and will scale with network transfer and cpu. Database should scale with a bump in VM specs as well, CPU and disk IOPS. If you keep your app server stateless you can simply multiply it for the number of copies you need for your load. Systemd can keep your app server running, it you docker it up and use that
  - devbent 3y ago
    > If you keep your app server stateless you can simply multiply it for the number of copies you need for your load. This right here so many times over. I'm not going to spend time worrying about scaling, I'm going spend time figuring out how to make stuff stateless.
    - pleoxy 3y ago
      Shove your state into the database. Done.
  - vikramkr 3y ago
    No that's all fine, I mean physically, where would I put a server and stuff if we didn't have cloud providers? I'd need to pay an isp for an IP address and maybe port forward and stuff like that right? I don't get why I wouldn't just do what you mentioned on a five dollar digital ocean droplet or an ec2 instance or whatever, the cloud still seems orders of magnitude easier to get off the ground.

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

Renting a server and using standard commodity open source software and standard (outsourced) sysadmins is way cheaper and faster than learning and dealing with all the proprietary AWS and Azure junk. (Probably also less reliable than "cloud", but who cares if you're a startup.)