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0 pointsanonfornoreason5y ago0 comments

This is a startup/business/tech forum, I am a founder of a 20 person business (hiring 7 more) that does this part-time because it's very low maintenance. I am finally hiring a devops person to handle the command line side of things, though I am still pretty happy to dink around at the datacenter every once in a while.

I taught myself as I went. I save about 10x over AWS. I would likely make the same decision today if I was starting from scratch, as I did 12+ years ago when I first started doing infra for our small website.

Infra is not magical, it's probably the easiest part of my job. Way easier than messing around with JS dependencies, way easier than troubleshooting a segfault in a C extension for our Rails app, and way easier than marketing, business management, accounting, interacting with legal, etc. And takes less time too.

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shiftpgdn5y ago

I think the trouble is a lot of developers have little to no insight into the business side of things and treat that initial AWS credit + follow-on VC funding as this magic money fountain. If you're a founder you understand a dollar saved is a dollar that keeps your doors open longer or a dollar into your pocket.

kroolik5y ago

I'm glad you've taught yourself infra things as you needed. But, you see, this is an anecdotal proof (like the whole article, anyway).

Learning infra is not the case all the time. Some companies choose AWS (or any other) for speed.

We can, again, argue but the argument is my PoV vs yours, or any other new commenter. Although I know how to maintain small infra: bunch of vms, reverse proxy and an rdbms, I'm not really into hosting HA Rabbitmq or Postgres myself. There is a ton of problems and configuration options coming from replication and consistency I would rather pay premium to people who have done it in the past.

I want my team to build solutions solving customers problems instead of fixing bugs in our replication code. It's all about perspective, I guess we can't reach a definitive answer for one or the other.

anonfornoreasonOP5y ago

If your team cannot manage a postgres, rabbitmq, etc install, then you need to find higher caliber employees.

kroolik5y ago

You would rather have a team of specialists for every piece of technology you have. I'd rather have my team members not focus on nuissances of database replication, and instead solve our customers' problems.

Looks like both of us are successful. Why does it have to be that there is only one way to success?

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shiftpgdn5y ago

kroolik5y ago

I'm glad you've taught yourself infra things as you needed. But, you see, this is an anecdotal proof (like the whole article, anyway).

Learning infra is not the case all the time. Some companies choose AWS (or any other) for speed.

anonfornoreasonOP5y ago

If your team cannot manage a postgres, rabbitmq, etc install, then you need to find higher caliber employees.

kroolik5y ago

Looks like both of us are successful. Why does it have to be that there is only one way to success?

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