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For other than startups, this provides nice gallery of idiocy: "Look, this is how many external Saas-dependencies we have and we have no control over our servi

by feider 12y ago

For other than startups, this provides nice gallery of idiocy: "Look, this is how many external Saas-dependencies we have and we have no control over our service." Just saying, because it is one thing to use open source and totally different thing to rely on 3rd party services.

avighnay 12y ago
Only in software industry do we still fee this way! For e.g. Can we imagine a car delivered to us without involvement of any third party components? Why do we feel software always has to be built from scratch or use free (open?) stuff? What is wrong in software being built on credible third party services? Perhaps the sign of a mature industry is when such credible third party partnerships become the norm...
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  I reckon the main issue is reliability. In your example of car delivery, if one driver is unavailable, there's gonna be a replacement. You could argue that if one datacenter goes down there'll be another, but those too can fail - see also the Amazon outage last year or whenever it was. And unlike a car delivery, these 3rd party suppliers (like AWS) will severely impact your business if they fail. Of course, so would a power outage. So IDK, there's pros and cons, as with everything.
  - avighnay 12y ago
    My analogy was to depict a car company and not a single individual's car. As in software company using third party services has the same business risks as a car company using third party services. My view point was not from a single individual using the product but from the manufacturers view point.
glenngillen 12y ago
Personally I'd be more wary of startups that have few external dependencies, because it likely means their trying to do too much that is outside of their core competencies and/or not spending as much time as they could be on their unique value proposition. Sure you can run your own centralized git hosting for your team. Do you really think you could do it better and more reliably than GitHub? Especially for less than $7/mo? And sure you can probably run your own instance of postgres, but how confident are you that your backups are going to be there when you need them? And that it'll be up as much as a dedicated instance of Heroku Postgres? I can probably count the number of people more experienced and qualified than that team (wrt running Postgres) on my fingers and none of them are going to run your database for $50/mo.

by feider 12y ago

avighnay 12y ago

Only in software industry do we still fee this way! For e.g. Can we imagine a car delivered to us without involvement of any third party components? Why do we feel software always has to be built from scratch or use free (open?) stuff? What is wrong in software being built on credible third party services? Perhaps the sign of a mature industry is when such credible third party partnerships become the norm...

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
I reckon the main issue is reliability. In your example of car delivery, if one driver is unavailable, there's gonna be a replacement. You could argue that if one datacenter goes down there'll be another, but those too can fail - see also the Amazon outage last year or whenever it was. And unlike a car delivery, these 3rd party suppliers (like AWS) will severely impact your business if they fail. Of course, so would a power outage. So IDK, there's pros and cons, as with everything.
- avighnay 12y ago
  My analogy was to depict a car company and not a single individual's car. As in software company using third party services has the same business risks as a car company using third party services. My view point was not from a single individual using the product but from the manufacturers view point.

glenngillen 12y ago

Personally I'd be more wary of startups that have few external dependencies, because it likely means their trying to do too much that is outside of their core competencies and/or not spending as much time as they could be on their unique value proposition. Sure you can run your own centralized git hosting for your team. Do you really think you could do it better and more reliably than GitHub? Especially for less than $7/mo? And sure you can probably run your own instance of postgres, but how confident are you that your backups are going to be there when you need them? And that it'll be up as much as a dedicated instance of Heroku Postgres? I can probably count the number of people more experienced and qualified than that team (wrt running Postgres) on my fingers and none of them are going to run your database for $50/mo.