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The phrase "a ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) phenomenon" means something that [the speaker thinks] is egregiously inefficient but which people got away with b

The phrase "a ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) phenomenon" means something that [the speaker thinks] is egregiously inefficient but which people got away with because the cost of money was low. VCs do care about these things, I remember hearing there was at least one well known VC that insisted that its startups all used AWS even for services that weren't cost competitive. They didn't want their startups to go viral and then not be able to scale, and if that meant some marginal businesses went from "profitable but unremarkable" to "unprofitable and dead" then so be it. This strategy worked because the sizes of the funds raised by the VCs were very large, and so investments were large, and so startups could afford to not think too hard about the costs of things. So the path DHH is arguing goes: 1. ZIRP pushes investors into high risk assets like VC funds. 2. VC funds give out huge investments to software startups. 3. Startups do lots of expensive things without worrying about the cost. 4. Having lots of microservices is expensive and the cost isn't justified by the benefits. 5. Therefore, microservices are a ZIRP phenomenon.

throwaway11460 3y ago
AWS/Azure/GCP is suggested because it's easier to hire someone who can maintain it after the founders burn out or exit, and most importantly because the VCs have access to loads of free credits that can get you through the first year or two, effectively increasing their investment (and yours too). Nothing stops you from just running an EC2 VM there, this has nothing to do with microservices. I never had a VC ask me about software system architecture, though yes they strongly suggested we use AWS, which we luckily did. There are services on AWS that bring significant benefit even if your app is a monolith - managed DB, email service, queues, nowadays the ML things, and in the past DevOps pipelines and Git repos before that became free/available on GitHub.

throwaway11460 3y ago

AWS/Azure/GCP is suggested because it's easier to hire someone who can maintain it after the founders burn out or exit, and most importantly because the VCs have access to loads of free credits that can get you through the first year or two, effectively increasing their investment (and yours too). Nothing stops you from just running an EC2 VM there, this has nothing to do with microservices. I never had a VC ask me about software system architecture, though yes they strongly suggested we use AWS, which we luckily did. There are services on AWS that bring significant benefit even if your app is a monolith - managed DB, email service, queues, nowadays the ML things, and in the past DevOps pipelines and Git repos before that became free/available on GitHub.