I'd say this is a terrible generalisation. Buy a dedicated server with 32gb ram, 16 cores and 4tb of disk for $40 a month and host it there to begin with. Same steps: pay with your card, set up the server and go.<p>Once you get to the point where your cat photo sharing startup cannot be offline for more than 1 minute and so needs geographic failover with scaling load balancing your making enough money to pay for it.<p>Makes no sense to pay thousands of dollars to handle one request a minute and save you running "apt-get install mysql nginx" + spending half a day configuring it
Not all startups should run on cloud providers. For many it makes sense but as soon as you have<p>- a very large amount of storage<p>- a lot of data transfer<p>- a lot of computation (for instance, on GPUs)<p>Then it could be a very worthwhile exercise to figure out what the trade-off in cost vs convenience will be if you decide to roll your own. For some projects the cloud absolutely makes sense, if you have just a few servers and the total cloud hosting bill would be a small fraction of what you'd pay a team of sysadmins to keep things up and running you are probably fine going with the cloud.<p>But if you are going to spend thousands or 10's of thousands of $ per month on cloud hosting then make sure that your resources are allocated properly.
Don't really like the article. Like it's written by manager, for some upper manager.<p>As many of people said here in the comments:
1. cloud is expensive as hell. Its much faster and cheaper to rent some dedicated server. Sure, it can fail since there's no failover/scaleout, but startups should fail fast, right? With good backup and acceptable downtime in case of failed hardware, dedicated hw is good enough for this stage of company development, imho<p>2. article assumes that building distributed system takes equal amount of time and knowledge as building one monolithic app.<p>3. you replaced one sys admin with dev ops. Sure, dev is dev ops, as I was dev and sys admin before, so don't see any difference there.<p>4. vendor lock in. Looks like at the end of the day, only AWS profits here (gold rush and seller of shovels 100+ y ago, anyone?)<p>5. let me just add this one; unpredictable cloud behaviour. Basically cloud providers forces you to scale out from beginning, since services can go down anytime, network can drop, etc. So instead of delivering features you're deep in aws metrics and logs, trying to understand why DynamoDb lost some random writes.<p>With right team, amount of money and resources, cloud makes sense. Same like running on your own rented dedicated/vm machines makes sense.
The biggest cost many young companies face is people, both salaries, and management/coordination overhead.<p>Assuming you need to pay someone at least 10k/month fully-loaded (and this is hard in SF) to manage all of this, I wouldn't bat an eye at staying on a PaaS until I got to 10-20k/month in expenses. Maybe even 30k. Managing operating systems, networking switches, datacenter contracts, linux distros, provisioning scripts, etc? No thanks.<p>I guess if you're worried about single dollars or tens of dollars/month you're just in a completely different place/situation than I am. With dev salaries being what they are today, the market is clearly signaling you need to optimize to use as little of it as possible.<p>Another thing, this article doesn't talk about serverless at all, where there isn't even compute to provision.
If you want to prove something is good for startups don't put Lyft and DoorDash names in your article, these are not startups, they have a valuation of more than $1bn ...<p>> Why spend days messing around with your own infrastructure, when you can get what you need out the door as soon as it’s ready?<p>If you have to spend days to make your product online it is not a problem of hosting. Stop pretending that copying lines of bash commands over ssh is too complicated.<p>Yes cloud can be convenient, but it is not essential at all
Linode is 40x cheaper for bandwidth than aws. It's also easier to setup an nginx cache than screw around with cloudlfare and the associated vendor lock in. I also found that my PDF files don't load in internet explorer if hosted on aws, but load fine when hosted on my linode. Apparently having a $1,000 aws bill doesn't qualify us to receive support. Be wary of the cloud and the associated hype and lock in.
Most of small to mid sized applications are really happy running on VPS like Linode or Digital Ocean, especially if we are talking about CRUD apps.<p>There are multiple pros of those setups:<p>1. They are cheap: $10-$20/month will be ok for smallish scale/b2b application. (You can always add more nodes later if you want).<p>2. As your application grows, it is much easier to migrate to another VPS or dedicated HW.<p>3. It is much easier to switch to cloud platform like AWS than trying to change provider or migrate into your hardware. Platform lock is real.<p>I do hear that managing your own servers is hard, but you can totally do it after reading couple of articles or paying couple hundred dollars to some competent sysadmin.
Frankly cloud providers have become the default way to run startups and small to medium-sized companies but frankly they're significantly expensive. You do get about a year of runway, which may make sense if you're able to close a VC funding round, but frankly you can spend 10-20k/year vs most startups that are spending 100k+/year at their cloud provider
1. Start with Heroku or similar
2. Get customers
3. Profit???
4. Hire people to help migrate to Kubernetes or similar<p>Stick with what you are good at and pay for everything else.
I'd say go for it.<p>With a caveat: don't tie yourself to that cloud provider, so if you want/need to make a move you can without re-building your entire stack. Most providers only make financial sense at scale if your load is wildly variable.<p>There's also something to be said for still being online when the rest of the internet is dark because of an AWS outage - for being able to take action when something goes wrong.
No way.
AWS is prohibitively expensive at scale as are decent managed servers.
Several jobs back. Startup with 150k to spend on IT.<p>* Buy 75k hardware.
* Two colos <= 30k yearly + full managed support.
* One PT SA 45K.<p>That AWS budget doesn't touch scaling like the ability to
scale across two sites and physical hardware for multiple years.