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I worked on a startup recently that had gone all in on AWS infrastructure, Lambda functions, managed database, IAM security. Man the infrastructure was absolut

I worked on a startup recently that had gone all in on AWS infrastructure, Lambda functions, managed database, IAM security. Man the infrastructure was absolutely massive and so much development effort went into it. They should have had a single server, a backup server, Caddy, Postgres and nodejs/typescript, and used their development effort getting the application written instead of futzing with AWS ad infinitum and burning money. But that's the way it is these days - startup founders raise money, find someone to build it and that someone always goes hard on the full AWS shebang and before you know it you spend most of your time programming the machine and not the application and the damn thing has become so complex it takes months to work out what the heck is going on inside the layers of accounts and IAM and policies and hundreds of lambda functions and weird crap.

datavirtue 2y ago
Same here. The CTO was also engaging in resume-driven development. There is no rational discussion about what tech stack to use. Executives need to be able to point to a modern tech stack as a signal of their relevancy and competence. No one will be caught dead slinging bare metal and running on-prem databases right now. It's just the look. I built out a POC and was running it on bare metal for serious workloads under my desk at GE (12-factor). Management practically scrambled to get me cloud access. My setup was ephemeral and could be easily reproduced anywhere. The software was easily deployed on, or integrated with, cloud services. I just shrugged. I didn't care where my code ran, to them it was some epic priority to get it in the cloud and generate extra expenses.
icedchai 2y ago
I've seen the same thing. Massive infrastructure for a site that could run on a small VM. More time was spent configuring infrastructure, Terraform, debugging IAM roles than building the actual code...

datavirtue 2y ago

Same here. The CTO was also engaging in resume-driven development. There is no rational discussion about what tech stack to use. Executives need to be able to point to a modern tech stack as a signal of their relevancy and competence. No one will be caught dead slinging bare metal and running on-prem databases right now. It's just the look. I built out a POC and was running it on bare metal for serious workloads under my desk at GE (12-factor). Management practically scrambled to get me cloud access. My setup was ephemeral and could be easily reproduced anywhere. The software was easily deployed on, or integrated with, cloud services. I just shrugged. I didn't care where my code ran, to them it was some epic priority to get it in the cloud and generate extra expenses.

icedchai 2y ago

I've seen the same thing. Massive infrastructure for a site that could run on a small VM. More time was spent configuring infrastructure, Terraform, debugging IAM roles than building the actual code...