41–50 of 101 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the "sql-as-document-store" post, I re-read it every now and then to realise how actually terrible it is: "For a many-to-many, we do something a bit naughty: we store the values with | characters between each value:" Not naughty, stupid.
The approach seemed reasonable enough until I hit that point.
The architectural decision to deploy each customer on their own segmented components to make sure that "no one user’s data to mingle with another" seems to me like a solution in search of a problem. First, the deployment was on AWS (EC2 and RDS among other services) which was probably already co-mingled with other AWS customers. Second, when you are selling a SAAS offering, the assumption is already there that you'll…
> Octopus Cloud customers could start a free 30-day trial, which meant that those hundreds of trial signups per month, each of which cost us $100 to host, quickly added up. > We also didn’t have our pricing quite right. We initially launched Octopus Cloud at $10/month, with a different pricing model from the one we currently use. Unfortunately, this was one of the most painful lessons we learned because the deficit b…
Even without the free trial, how on earth can you burn $100 in cloud resources in a month if you plan to resell it for $10?
Another mistake, it was pointed out by Kevin Hale, iirc, this year at startupschool, that founders make is they think their pricing model (or their UX) is a key differentiator, when in most cases it isn't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why would you bother with a relational database at that point? That sounds like it’s not normalized. It's non-1NF, though they sometimes (based on expected cardinality) normalize that aspect via a trigger, using the application-accessed table as, in effect, something of a write-through denormalized materialized view. It's not an entirely unreasonablev way to use an RDBMS in and of itself.
except they used sql server and sql server performance with this is awful, oracle would have been able to handle it much better
> Octopus Cloud customers could start a free 30-day trial, which meant that those hundreds of trial signups per month, each of which cost us $100 to host, quickly added up. > We also didn’t have our pricing quite right. We initially launched Octopus Cloud at $10/month, with a different pricing model from the one we currently use. Unfortunately, this was one of the most painful lessons we learned because the deficit b…
Even without the free trial, how on earth can you burn $100 in cloud resources in a month if you plan to resell it for $10?
AWS has something like profit 25% margin. Therefore assuming that AWS is within 15% of doing a half-decent job at controlling costs, that's still max 40% profit margin if you were running bare-metal and beating AWS at their own game to the tune of 15%. So if you're selling stuff for 10/month, your AWS bill should be 17/month just to break even after all the awesome engineering you've done with the VC money -- at least that's how I see it.
Now, if they are doing incredibly stupid stuff, to the tune of 90% wasted ec2 cpu cycles/db requests, then maybe they've priced it right -- who knows.
Would love to hear some insights on where I might be wrong/misjudging here.
Can't wait for this Cloud meme to die out and we can go back to On Prem but instead of VMs managed by VMWare, Cloudstack, Vagrant, LXC etc, we will have nodes managed by Kubernetes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even without the free trial, how on earth can you burn $100 in cloud resources in a month if you plan to resell it for $10?
That's the lesson: The most obvious advice isn't obvious. If one goes through https://startupschool.org/library one realises how much of the advise ought to be common knowledge and common sense, but that's the thing, folks ignore it all the time . Another mistake, it was pointed out by Kevin Hale, iirc, this year at startupschool, that founders make is they think their pricing model (or their UX) is a key differentia…
Yes, I have seen that happen a few times in SuS (I'm a 2018 and 2019 batch alumni). Founders are obsessive about their pricing and as a result they usually undercharge.
My usual advice to pre-market-fit stage founders is that you don't know yet what the right price is, so choose $random_price and move on, you can always adjust later. And for post-market-fit stage: raise your prices.
Of course, there is no single 'right' answer on pricing. It depends on many factors, but for B2B it usually holds true that pricing isn't that much of a differentiator.
> Octopus Cloud customers could start a free 30-day trial, which meant that those hundreds of trial signups per month, each of which cost us $100 to host, quickly added up. > We also didn’t have our pricing quite right. We initially launched Octopus Cloud at $10/month, with a different pricing model from the one we currently use. Unfortunately, this was one of the most painful lessons we learned because the deficit b…
> the irony of a company whose product appears to be about cloud deployment having a disaster by deploying to the cloud should not be lost on us Is that really irony though? I would think irony here would be them writing a blogpost about their troubles with their cloud deployments.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/06/21/045228/dropbox-...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/17/scary_code_of_the_w...
Except S3. Unlimited objects, and unlimited Put and Get requests.
Can't wait for this Cloud meme to die out and we can go back to On Prem but instead of VMs managed by VMWare, Cloudstack, Vagrant, LXC etc, we will have nodes managed by Kubernetes.
Why would cloud go away? If you’re a team of 3-4 people and have a startup idea what’s easier? Create an AWS account and smartly spin up required servers? Or find a location (rent$), get fiber($$) to that location($$), find hardware($$), install said hardware. Now you’re back to where you were with AWS. For larger already established businesses on prem is probably a setup you should explore but on day 0 of a new busi…
Total first year cost on this setup: $8,800
Total three year cost on this setup: $12,400
2x m5d.4xlarge EC2 instances (this isn't counting ingress/egress rates, or really anything else) First year cost: $15,621 .
Total three year cost for the EC2 instance: $46,863.36
For the cost of using EC2 you could hire an extra person to help grow your company.
Yes, you can get discounts in AWS for agreeing to a three year term. Yes AWS offers you flexibility to walk away at any time.
If you have a base line load (which most companies do) you should really look at colocating your owned equipment. You also get the bonus of being out of the watchful eye of Amazon's profitability team looking to see if they can copy what you're doing.