Startups need to bother about scaling and automating ops at the right time. Can't be thinking about scaling ops from day one. Choose a reasonably sensible setup/framework that will help postpone large-scale automation.<p>BTW, don't put ops on a pedestal. In one of the startups I worked with, the ops dept became powerful to the extent of dictating what software could be hosted. Ops is important especially when you start growing, but make sure they don't supersede the dev team.
An interesting sidenote-- seen in the del.icio.us bookmark notes for this article, by a facebook employee: <p>"nice article on operations. we're going to open source the shit out of this space."