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> Unless you selected a platform that is too complex to start with. I think that many of the PaaS companies I see today are here mainly for two reasons: Rails &

by nthj 14y ago

> Unless you selected a platform that is too complex to start with. I think that many of the PaaS companies I see today are here mainly for two reasons: Rails & Java frameworks. I think this is where I misunderstood you originally. For 3 days, Hacker News has been discussing the performance of -Rails- on Heroku. If I had understood at the beginning that your real argument is to use Sinatra/PHP/NodeJS/whatever (you're somewhat vague on recommended alternatives), I would not have jumped in. I do not have enough experience hosting other tech stacks at scale to be advising on the viability of open source solutions. As for your other 3 points, presuming a Rails stack: all of those smell like a premature optimization for any company with less than 500K customers. If I went to my clients and said "Hey, we should invest 1-2 days in spooling up a server, because if we gain traction 6 months from now, we'll have to pay Heroku a lot of money until we fix it!", they would grin a bit and say: "That would be a great problem to have. Now go back to shipping features so we gain traction and actually have to worry about fantastic problems like how to deal with having too many users."

gingerlime 14y ago
Yes, features are important, and you don't want to waste your time doing stuff you can easily outsource. However, I think it's not about saving $2000 by outsourcing, it's really about understanding how your software runs. How each request is handled. How each layer and architecture affects scalability, performance and stability. One of the things we've seen in this Rails/Heroku example is that the platform can't really be completely transparent. If you treat it as some obscure service and don't understand how it fits together - you lose. You can't optimize, you can't scale, you can't give consistent experience to your users. I personally don't particularly like the distinction between devops and developers. I think all developers should have a good grasp of the platform. Of how pieces fit together. This is a worthwhile investment, not to save money on your PaaS, but to build a good solid app with good architecture. Performance, scalability and security are also features you should be shipping.

by nthj 14y ago

gingerlime 14y ago

Yes, features are important, and you don't want to waste your time doing stuff you can easily outsource. However, I think it's not about saving $2000 by outsourcing, it's really about understanding how your software runs. How each request is handled. How each layer and architecture affects scalability, performance and stability. One of the things we've seen in this Rails/Heroku example is that the platform can't really be completely transparent. If you treat it as some obscure service and don't understand how it fits together - you lose. You can't optimize, you can't scale, you can't give consistent experience to your users. I personally don't particularly like the distinction between devops and developers. I think all developers should have a good grasp of the platform. Of how pieces fit together. This is a worthwhile investment, not to save money on your PaaS, but to build a good solid app with good architecture. Performance, scalability and security are also features you should be shipping.