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I helped bootstrap a company that made an enterprise automation engine. The team wanted to make the service available as SaaS for boosting sales. They could ha

I helped bootstrap a company that made an enterprise automation engine. The team wanted to make the service available as SaaS for boosting sales. They could have got the job done by hosting the service in a vps with a multi-tenant database schema. Instead, they went about learning kubernetes and drillingg deep into "cloud-native" stack. Spent a year trying to setup the perfect devops pipeline. Not surprisingly the company went out of business within the next few years.

cpursley 1y ago
Yep, this is why I'm a proponent of paas until the bill actually hurts. Just pay the heroku/render/fly tax and focus on product market fit. Or, play with servers and K8s, burning your investors money, then move on to the next gig and repeat...
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  > Or, play with servers and K8s, burning your investors money, then move on to the next gig and repeat... I mean, of the two, the PaaS route certainly burns more money, the exception being the rare shop that is so incompetent they can't even get their own infrastructure configured correctly, like in GP's situation. There are guaranteed more shops that would be better off self-hosting and saving on their current massive cloud bills than the rare one-offs that actually save so much time using cloud services, it takes them from bankruptcy to being functional.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    > the PaaS route certainly burns more money, Does it? Vercel is $20/month and Neon starts at $5/month. That obviously goes up as you scale up, but $25/month seems like a fairly cheap place to start to me. (I don't work for Vercel or Neon, just a happy customer)
    - cpursley 1y ago
      Yeah, also a happy neon customer - but they can get pricy. Still prefer them over AWS. For compute, Fly is pretty competitive.
      - theaniketmaurya 1y ago
        I’m using Neon too and upgraded to the scale up version today. Curious, what do you mean rhat they can get pricey?
        Aeolun 1y ago
        Like, you keep your server running for a month and you need to pay $255 pricey? I can get about 64 cores of dedicated compute for the price of a single neon compute (4c/16gb) unit. And that’s before you factor in 500gb of storage.
        cpursley 1y ago
        And how much time are you spending babysitting all of this? What’s your upgrade, deploy and rollback story? Because I don’t have to even think about these things.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Yeah, same. Vercel + Neon and then if you actually have customers and actually end up paying them enough money that it becomes significant, then you can refactor and move platforms, but until you do, there are bigger fish to fry.
  - matt-p 1y ago
    100%. Making it a docker container and deploying it is literally a few hours at most.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  The moment I sign up for a PaaS the bill hurts. I can never get over the fact I can get 1000x more compute for the same price, never mind that I never use it and have to set everything up myself. I’ll just never pay to lock myself in to something so restricted. My dedicated server allows me to do anything I want or need.
  - cpursley 1y ago
    If you enjoy playing with servers instead of shipping features, enjoy!
    - Aeolun 1y ago
      That’s only true if you still have to learn how to deploy to a server. I have the opposite problem. I need to learn how to deploy to these wonky services, and it never seems to transfer from one to the other.
      - cpursley 1y ago
        I moved from Heroku -> to Render.com in a day, then later Render -> Fly in a couple hours because everything was already dockerized. I’ve never really have to think about my servers on any of these providers, they just run.
joshmn 1y ago
This is my experience too—there’s too much time wasted trying to solve a problem that might exist 5 years down the road. So many projects and early-stage companies would be just fine either with a PaaS or nginx in front of a docker container. You’ll know when you hit your pain point.
rixed 1y ago
> Not surprisingly the company went out of business within the next few years. But the engineers could find new jobs thanks to their acquired k8s experience.
- ozozozd 1y ago
  Get paid to learn and build your career instead, baby!

cpursley 1y ago

Yep, this is why I'm a proponent of paas until the bill actually hurts. Just pay the heroku/render/fly tax and focus on product market fit. Or, play with servers and K8s, burning your investors money, then move on to the next gig and repeat...

DaSHacka 1y ago
> Or, play with servers and K8s, burning your investors money, then move on to the next gig and repeat... I mean, of the two, the PaaS route certainly burns more money, the exception being the rare shop that is so incompetent they can't even get their own infrastructure configured correctly, like in GP's situation. There are guaranteed more shops that would be better off self-hosting and saving on their current massive cloud bills than the rare one-offs that actually save so much time using cloud services, it takes them from bankruptcy to being functional.
- fragmede 1y ago
  > the PaaS route certainly burns more money, Does it? Vercel is $20/month and Neon starts at $5/month. That obviously goes up as you scale up, but $25/month seems like a fairly cheap place to start to me. (I don't work for Vercel or Neon, just a happy customer)
  - cpursley 1y ago
    Yeah, also a happy neon customer - but they can get pricy. Still prefer them over AWS. For compute, Fly is pretty competitive.
    - theaniketmaurya 1y ago
      I’m using Neon too and upgraded to the scale up version today. Curious, what do you mean rhat they can get pricey?
      - Aeolun 1y ago
        Like, you keep your server running for a month and you need to pay $255 pricey? I can get about 64 cores of dedicated compute for the price of a single neon compute (4c/16gb) unit. And that’s before you factor in 500gb of storage.
        cpursley 1y ago
        And how much time are you spending babysitting all of this? What’s your upgrade, deploy and rollback story? Because I don’t have to even think about these things.
fragmede 1y ago
Yeah, same. Vercel + Neon and then if you actually have customers and actually end up paying them enough money that it becomes significant, then you can refactor and move platforms, but until you do, there are bigger fish to fry.
- matt-p 1y ago
  100%. Making it a docker container and deploying it is literally a few hours at most.
Aeolun 1y ago
The moment I sign up for a PaaS the bill hurts. I can never get over the fact I can get 1000x more compute for the same price, never mind that I never use it and have to set everything up myself. I’ll just never pay to lock myself in to something so restricted. My dedicated server allows me to do anything I want or need.
- cpursley 1y ago
  If you enjoy playing with servers instead of shipping features, enjoy!
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    That’s only true if you still have to learn how to deploy to a server. I have the opposite problem. I need to learn how to deploy to these wonky services, and it never seems to transfer from one to the other.
    - cpursley 1y ago
      I moved from Heroku -> to Render.com in a day, then later Render -> Fly in a couple hours because everything was already dockerized. I’ve never really have to think about my servers on any of these providers, they just run.

joshmn 1y ago

This is my experience too—there’s too much time wasted trying to solve a problem that might exist 5 years down the road. So many projects and early-stage companies would be just fine either with a PaaS or nginx in front of a docker container. You’ll know when you hit your pain point.

rixed 1y ago

> Not surprisingly the company went out of business within the next few years. But the engineers could find new jobs thanks to their acquired k8s experience.

ozozozd 1y ago
Get paid to learn and build your career instead, baby!