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This article doesn't offer any compelling argument IMO. When you are a startup you have to focus on getting to PMF, it doesn't matter that you spend more for ma

by Sytten 2y ago

This article doesn't offer any compelling argument IMO. When you are a startup you have to focus on getting to PMF, it doesn't matter that you spend more for managed services. In fact your time is much better spend building your service and iterating faster than dealing with server updates, backups, high availability, etc, etc.

teaearlgraycold 2y ago
Also a lot of startups right now need 1 - N GPUs on demand. I do not think the author has ever worked on a growing product.
- gcapu 2y ago
  Right now GCP and lambda cloud have almost no GPUs available. I would have done better on prem.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Do they? Why?
  - gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
    Startups are about hype. Current hype is AI. Google’s CPU based AI training system, whose name I’m blanking on now, doesn’t out perform GPU on smaller loads. Can’t say, “This pen is worth paying $10k unless you include ‘with AI’”.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Right, I get the "AI -> GPU" connection, I'm asking: literally what does a startup do with an on-demand GPU? What is the workload?
  - dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
    Sadly, even if you do something absolutely non-"AI" related, you need to add "AI" somewhere, it's a kind of SEO for VC. Yesterday it was blockchain, tomorrow it will be something else.
    - optimalquiet 2y ago
      Did blockchain startups ever provide any real value to end-users? Like, at all? Speaking from my technical but not SWE perspective, the only things I'm familiar with using the blockchain are cryptocurrency (obviously) and NFTs, which as far as I'm concerned are a scam. AI does seem different in that regard, I think it is providing tremendous value to people. Just probably not in the random places where people are throwing it in where it doesn't actually fit.
      - dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
        I agree with you but we're not talking about providing any value for end users but about venture investments and raising capital. You don't need to actually provide any value, you just need to convince someone with money to spend it, promising more money in the end. This money may never actually materialize (see Uber) but you can still receive a lot of money year by year, based on someone else's expectations.
omoikane 2y ago
Part of it seem to be in the format of the "stop doing math" meme[1], so I am not sure how much of it is serious. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200418170753/https://twitter.com/WTMMP/status/1251285960819687426 https://web.archive.org/web/20200418170753/https://twitter.c...
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
That makes sense with yesterday's low interest rate and high VC investment, sure, and for startups that are VC funded so have cash to burn. But we're entering leaner times. Many younger people haven't been through this before. Others may not remember. Investors are going to demand more responsible spending, and better balance books, sooner. If you can start on a shoestring and hold on until you need to scale, you have an advantage in this market that you didn't have 5 years ago. That and a lot of the cloud stuff comes with an inherent complexity. Architecting for cloud hosted K8 and various cloud services comes not only with a $$ cost but a software architecture complexity & labour overhead. A single server can do a lot these days. Many many businesses think they need to scale out of the box a lot more than they do.
- snoman 2y ago
  I’m sorry, are you advocating to do k8s on-premise as opposed to cloud? Or are you straw-manning “cloud architecture” by assuming that k8s is somehow some cloud requirement vs a single box you paid for yourself in a colo? You can spin up a single server in the cloud as simply (or more so) than in a colo. Then you can add a load balancer and auto scaling in a few hrs (or less depending on experience) if you reach the point where you need to scale.
gigatexal 2y ago
I dunno ... been there done the startup thing. Had we not gone with k8s and just gone with a vm -- even without docker compose -- but just a monolith we'd have been 1000% further along than when I left. Even doing everything cloud native means learning how to package your stuff for that provider and go through their docs, learn their idosyncracies, etc. BUT!!!! Let's say you hire a kid whose been tinkering with servers in their room since they were teens and know their way around a Linux distro and can package python and run a proxy etc etc There's a lot of compelling reason to simplify the tech stack and cloud/k8s/etc makes sense only when the scale requires it. --- That being said -- Hetzner is not the panacea its pricing might suggest. We run our self hosted gitlab on it and we've had 2-3 incidents in the last month that required them to either power cycle a machine or fix some networking thing etc etc. I kinda expected more. But it's hella cheap: where else will you find so much hardware for 200 a month.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- YZF 2y ago
  If your entire application fits in one VM forever - fair enough. If you're running a whole fleet of VMs and need to manage them the pain of doing that is quickly going to exceed the "pain" of using k8s. Do you need something like k8s ingress? Do you need the ability to move workloads if a machine goes down? certs? external-dns? Are you going to deploying tooling that's available off the shelf for k8s? (lessay Prometheus/Grafana?). VMs have overhead and likely waste a lot of resources. I've seen this "monolith" and I've seen containerized/k8s. For anything that needs to scale and needs similar abstractions you get out of k8s you definitely should not try to reproduce this using VMs.
  - toast0 2y ago
    > If your entire application fits in one VM forever - fair enough. A lot of applications can fit on a single machine. Single machines have gotten so big: 256+ cores, terrabytes of ram, huge amounts of fast storage, 100+Gbps NICs. Yeah, you should have 2-4 for continuity, but that doesn't need orchestration. You really don't need to start thinking about horizontal scaling unless you're getting close to filling a single big machine. Especially since the longer it takes for you to scale to big machines, the bigger the machines will be when you get there. If your application is very latency sensitive, then maybe you need to run machines in more places, and maybe you want something to orchestrate that...
codegeek 2y ago
I think you are missing the point of the article. What I took from it is that majority of cases do not need the complexity that cloud brings including tons of unnecessary tools that are part of a cloud deployment. Yes u need to get to Pmf first but you can do that without a kubernetes architecture or deploying a highly available app in 5 different zones.
vidarh 2y ago
Whether it matters depends on how much your hosting costs make up of your burn rate. I agree it's a distraction for some startups, but I've also done startups where using AWS would've meant the company wasn't viable at all.

by Sytten 2y ago

teaearlgraycold 2y ago

Also a lot of startups right now need 1 - N GPUs on demand. I do not think the author has ever worked on a growing product.

gcapu 2y ago
Right now GCP and lambda cloud have almost no GPUs available. I would have done better on prem.
tptacek 2y ago
Do they? Why?
- gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
  Startups are about hype. Current hype is AI. Google’s CPU based AI training system, whose name I’m blanking on now, doesn’t out perform GPU on smaller loads. Can’t say, “This pen is worth paying $10k unless you include ‘with AI’”.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Right, I get the "AI -> GPU" connection, I'm asking: literally what does a startup do with an on-demand GPU? What is the workload?
- dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
  Sadly, even if you do something absolutely non-"AI" related, you need to add "AI" somewhere, it's a kind of SEO for VC. Yesterday it was blockchain, tomorrow it will be something else.
  - optimalquiet 2y ago
    Did blockchain startups ever provide any real value to end-users? Like, at all? Speaking from my technical but not SWE perspective, the only things I'm familiar with using the blockchain are cryptocurrency (obviously) and NFTs, which as far as I'm concerned are a scam. AI does seem different in that regard, I think it is providing tremendous value to people. Just probably not in the random places where people are throwing it in where it doesn't actually fit.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
      I agree with you but we're not talking about providing any value for end users but about venture investments and raising capital. You don't need to actually provide any value, you just need to convince someone with money to spend it, promising more money in the end. This money may never actually materialize (see Uber) but you can still receive a lot of money year by year, based on someone else's expectations.

omoikane 2y ago

Part of it seem to be in the format of the "stop doing math" meme[1], so I am not sure how much of it is serious. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200418170753/https://twitter.com/WTMMP/status/1251285960819687426 https://web.archive.org/web/20200418170753/https://twitter.c...

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

That makes sense with yesterday's low interest rate and high VC investment, sure, and for startups that are VC funded so have cash to burn. But we're entering leaner times. Many younger people haven't been through this before. Others may not remember. Investors are going to demand more responsible spending, and better balance books, sooner. If you can start on a shoestring and hold on until you need to scale, you have an advantage in this market that you didn't have 5 years ago. That and a lot of the cloud stuff comes with an inherent complexity. Architecting for cloud hosted K8 and various cloud services comes not only with a $$ cost but a software architecture complexity & labour overhead. A single server can do a lot these days. Many many businesses think they need to scale out of the box a lot more than they do.

snoman 2y ago
I’m sorry, are you advocating to do k8s on-premise as opposed to cloud? Or are you straw-manning “cloud architecture” by assuming that k8s is somehow some cloud requirement vs a single box you paid for yourself in a colo? You can spin up a single server in the cloud as simply (or more so) than in a colo. Then you can add a load balancer and auto scaling in a few hrs (or less depending on experience) if you reach the point where you need to scale.

gigatexal 2y ago

I dunno ... been there done the startup thing. Had we not gone with k8s and just gone with a vm -- even without docker compose -- but just a monolith we'd have been 1000% further along than when I left. Even doing everything cloud native means learning how to package your stuff for that provider and go through their docs, learn their idosyncracies, etc. BUT!!!! Let's say you hire a kid whose been tinkering with servers in their room since they were teens and know their way around a Linux distro and can package python and run a proxy etc etc There's a lot of compelling reason to simplify the tech stack and cloud/k8s/etc makes sense only when the scale requires it. --- That being said -- Hetzner is not the panacea its pricing might suggest. We run our self hosted gitlab on it and we've had 2-3 incidents in the last month that required them to either power cycle a machine or fix some networking thing etc etc. I kinda expected more. But it's hella cheap: where else will you find so much hardware for 200 a month.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
YZF 2y ago
If your entire application fits in one VM forever - fair enough. If you're running a whole fleet of VMs and need to manage them the pain of doing that is quickly going to exceed the "pain" of using k8s. Do you need something like k8s ingress? Do you need the ability to move workloads if a machine goes down? certs? external-dns? Are you going to deploying tooling that's available off the shelf for k8s? (lessay Prometheus/Grafana?). VMs have overhead and likely waste a lot of resources. I've seen this "monolith" and I've seen containerized/k8s. For anything that needs to scale and needs similar abstractions you get out of k8s you definitely should not try to reproduce this using VMs.
- toast0 2y ago
  > If your entire application fits in one VM forever - fair enough. A lot of applications can fit on a single machine. Single machines have gotten so big: 256+ cores, terrabytes of ram, huge amounts of fast storage, 100+Gbps NICs. Yeah, you should have 2-4 for continuity, but that doesn't need orchestration. You really don't need to start thinking about horizontal scaling unless you're getting close to filling a single big machine. Especially since the longer it takes for you to scale to big machines, the bigger the machines will be when you get there. If your application is very latency sensitive, then maybe you need to run machines in more places, and maybe you want something to orchestrate that...

codegeek 2y ago

I think you are missing the point of the article. What I took from it is that majority of cases do not need the complexity that cloud brings including tons of unnecessary tools that are part of a cloud deployment. Yes u need to get to Pmf first but you can do that without a kubernetes architecture or deploying a highly available app in 5 different zones.

vidarh 2y ago

Whether it matters depends on how much your hosting costs make up of your burn rate. I agree it's a distraction for some startups, but I've also done startups where using AWS would've meant the company wasn't viable at all.