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Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

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Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#11

Post by steveBK123 »

electroly wrote: post #6

> The markup cost of using RDS (or any managed database) is worth it. Every so often I price out RDS to replace our colocated SQL Server cluster and it's so unrealistically expensive that I just have to laugh. It's absurdly far beyond what I'd be willing to pay. The markup is enough to pay for the colocation rack, the AWS Direct Connects, the servers, the SAN, the SQL Server licenses, the maintenance contracts, and a…

RDS pricing is deranged at the scales I've seen too. $60k/year for something I could run on just a slice of one of my on-prem $20k servers. This is something we would have run 10s of. $600k/year operational against sub-$100k capital cost pays DBAs, backups, etc with money to spare.

Sure, maybe if you are some sort of SaaS with a need for a small single DB, that also needs to be resilient, backed up, rock solid bulletproof.. it makes sense? But how many cases are there of this? If its so fundamental to your product and needs such uptime & redundancy, what are the odds its also reasonably small?

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#12

Post by Aeolun »

electroly wrote: post #8
vasco wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a huge instance with an enterprise license on top. Most large SaaS companies can run off of $5k / m or cheaper RDS deployments which isn't enough to pay someone. The amount of people running half a million a year RDS bills might not be that large. For most people RDS is worth it as soon as you have backup requirements and would have to implement them yourself.

Definitely--I recommend this after you've reached the point where you're writing huge checks to AWS. Maybe this is just assumed but I've never seen anyone else add that nuance to the "just use RDS" advice. It's always just "RDS is worth it" full stop, as in this article.

To some extend that is probably true, because when you’ve built a business that needs a 500k/year database fully on RDS it’s already priced into your profits, and switching to a self-hosted database will seem unacceptably risky for something that works just fine.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#13

Post by 005 »

Interesting read, I agree with adopting an identity platform but this can definitely be contentious if you want to own your data.

I wonder how much one should pay attention to future problems at the start of a startup versus "move fast and break things." Some of this stuff might just put you off finishing.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#14

Post by crabmusket »

CSMastermind wrote: post #10

So by and large I agree with the things in this article. It's interesting that the points I disagree with the author on are all SaaS products: > Moving off JIRA onto linear I don't get the hype. Linear is fine and all but I constantly find things I either can't or don't know how to do. How do I make different ticket types with different sets of fields? No clue. > Not using Terraform Cloud No Regrets I generally recom…

We moved from Trello to Linear and it's been fantastic. I hope to never work at an organisation large enough for JIRA to be a good idea.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#15

Post by sgarland »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #3

The kitchen sink database used by everybody is such a common problem, yet it is repeated over and over again. If you grow it becomes significant tech debt and a performance bottleneck. Fortunately, with managed DBs like RDS it is really easy to run individual DB clusters per major app.

The downside is then you have many, many DBs to fight with, to monitor, to tune, etc.

This is rarely a problem when things are small, but as they grow, the bad schema decisions made by empowering DBA-less teams to run their own infra become glaringly obvious.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#17

Post by kaycebasques »

hayst4ck wrote: post #5

I would love to see this type of thing from multiple sources. This reflects a lot of my own experience. I think the format of this is great. I suppose it would take a motivated individual to go around and ask people to essentially fill out a form like this to get that.

I also think it's a great format.

One suggestion if we're gonna standardize around this format. Avoid the double negatives. In some cases author says "avoided XYZ" and then the judgment was "no regrets". Too many layers for me to parse there. Instead, I suggest each section being the product that was used. If you regret that product, in the details is where you mention the product you should have used. Or you have another section for product ABC and you provide the context by saying "we adopted ABC after we abandoned XYZ".

I don't recommend trying to categorize into general areas like logging, postmortems, etc. Just do a top-level section for each product.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#18

Post by steveBK123 »

shrubble wrote: post #2

"Since the database is used by everyone, it becomes cared for by no one. Startups don’t have the luxury of a DBA, and everything owned by no one is owned by infrastructure eventually" I think adding a DBA or hiring one to help you layout your database should not be considered a 'luxury'...

There's even consultants you can hire out by the day instead of a full-time DBA.

Maybe you need help with setup for a few weeks/months, and then some routine billable hours per month for maintenance / change advice.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#19

Post by CSMastermind »

crabmusket wrote: post #14
CSMastermind wrote: post #10

So by and large I agree with the things in this article. It's interesting that the points I disagree with the author on are all SaaS products: > Moving off JIRA onto linear I don't get the hype. Linear is fine and all but I constantly find things I either can't or don't know how to do. How do I make different ticket types with different sets of fields? No clue. > Not using Terraform Cloud No Regrets I generally recom…

We moved from Trello to Linear and it's been fantastic. I hope to never work at an organisation large enough for JIRA to be a good idea.

To be fair Linear does strike me as everything everyone always hoped Trello would be.

So if that's the upgrade path you're going down I'd expect it to be fantastic.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#20

Post by Garypaul »

CSMastermind wrote: post #10

So by and large I agree with the things in this article. It's interesting that the points I disagree with the author on are all SaaS products: > Moving off JIRA onto linear I don't get the hype. Linear is fine and all but I constantly find things I either can't or don't know how to do. How do I make different ticket types with different sets of fields? No clue. > Not using Terraform Cloud No Regrets I generally recom…

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