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Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

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Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#201

Post by nucleardog »

mannyv wrote: post #192
econner wrote: post #3

It's weird that one of the reasons that you endorse AWS is that you had regular meetings with your account manager but then you regret premium support which is the whole reason you had regular meetings with your account manager.

If you know what you're doing you don't need AWS support. We add support when we want to do something new, like MediaTailor + SSAI. At that point we're exploring and trying to get our heads around how things work. Once it works there's no real point in support. That said, you need to ask your account manager about (1) discounts in exchange for spend commitments, and (2) technical assistance. In general we have a talk…

> That said, you need to ask your account manager about (1) discounts in exchange for spend commitments, and (2) technical assistance.

Depending what precisely you mean by the second one, you may not even need an AM/support for that.

They won't help me use the platform, but they will still address issues with the platform. If you run into bugs, things not behaving how they're documented, or something that simply isn't exposed/available to customers they seem to be pretty good about getting it resolved regardless of your spend or support level.

(On my personal account with minimal spend, no AM, and no support... I've had engineers from the relevant teams email me directly after submitting a ticket for issues.)

So yeah, "if you know what you're doing" you probably don't even need the paid-for support.

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#202

Post by martinald »

cryptonector wrote: post #178
rco8786 wrote: post #140

I think we're making a mistake by shoving all of this into the cloud rather than building tooling around local agents (worktrees, containers, as mentioned as "difficult" in the post). I think as an industry we just reach for cloud like our predecessors reached for IBM, without critical thought about what's actually the right tool for the job. If you can manage docker containers in a cloud, you can manage them on your…

The thing is that startups often don't have the time or capital to build a data center even though public cloud is just more expensive. If you're bootstrapping a business then it makes sense. My advice would be to always use only those features of the public cloud that you can also use on your private cloud, such as Kubernetes.

How do people think that's the only two options (AWS/cloud or build a datacenter)? It astounds me.

There's _so_ many providers of 'bare metal' dedicated servers - Hetzner and OVH come up a lot, but _before_ AWS there was ev1servers (anyone remember them?).

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#203

Post by darth_avocado »

mannyv wrote: post #192
econner wrote: post #3

It's weird that one of the reasons that you endorse AWS is that you had regular meetings with your account manager but then you regret premium support which is the whole reason you had regular meetings with your account manager.

If you know what you're doing you don't need AWS support. We add support when we want to do something new, like MediaTailor + SSAI. At that point we're exploring and trying to get our heads around how things work. Once it works there's no real point in support. That said, you need to ask your account manager about (1) discounts in exchange for spend commitments, and (2) technical assistance. In general we have a talk…

> If you know what you're doing you don't need AWS support.

Hard disagree. I have to engage with AWS support almost once every 6 months. A lot of them end up being bugs identified in their services. Premium support is extremely valuable when your production services are down and you need to get them back up asap.

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#204

Post by darth_avocado »

rf15 wrote: post #102

> Startups don’t have the luxury of a DBA but... you are spending so much on AWS and premium support... surely you can afford that

Most startups don’t need a dba, just competent full stack/backend engineers. That being said, I understand why many startups prefer having a dba. Not exactly fun when your only staff engineer likes to just store everything in a jsonb column in Postgres.

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#206

Post by darth_avocado »

consumer451 wrote: post #155

> Multiple applications sharing a database [0] > Regret Thanks for this data point. I am currently trying to make this call, and I was still on the fence. This has tipped me to the separate db side. Can anyone else share their experience with this decision? [0] https://cep.dev/posts/every-infrastructure-decision-i-endors...

Coming from a world of acquisitions, I see almost every startup make the same decision of having a single database for everything. Can’t stress enough how big of a problem this becomes once you scale even a little bit. Migrations are expensive and time consuming. And for most teams, moving an application to a different db almost always becomes an urgent need, when they are least able to.

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#207

Post by darth_avocado »

zie wrote: post #163
consumer451 wrote: post #155

> Multiple applications sharing a database [0] > Regret Thanks for this data point. I am currently trying to make this call, and I was still on the fence. This has tipped me to the separate db side. Can anyone else share their experience with this decision? [0] https://cep.dev/posts/every-infrastructure-decision-i-endors...

My advice: One code base and one database. In my experience, it's easier to take schema out into a new DB in the off-chance it makes sense to do so. The big place I'd disagree with this is when "your" data is actually customer data, and then you want 1 DB per customer whenever you can and SQLite is your BFF here. You have 1 DB for your stuff(accounting, whatever) and then 1 SQLite file per customer, that holds their…

> If you know what you're doing you don't need AWS support.

Some big companies have massive monolith code bases. This is not a generalization you could apply universally. There are a lot of other considerations. What kind of features are we talking about, what kind of I/o patterns are planned, what is the scale of data expected, etc.

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#208

Post by andersmurphy »

martinald wrote: post #202
cryptonector wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that startups often don't have the time or capital to build a data center even though public cloud is just more expensive. If you're bootstrapping a business then it makes sense. My advice would be to always use only those features of the public cloud that you can also use on your private cloud, such as Kubernetes.

How do people think that's the only two options (AWS/cloud or build a datacenter)? It astounds me. There's _so_ many providers of 'bare metal' dedicated servers - Hetzner and OVH come up a lot, but _before_ AWS there was ev1servers (anyone remember them?).

Because, a lot of money went into cloud marketing to convince us those are the only two options.

Tech is for all intents and purposes a planed economy (we are in the middle of the LLM five year plan comrade).

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#209

Post by Hovertruck »

Much of this matches my own experience. A few thoughts:

1. Cost tracking meetings with your finance team are useful, but for AWS and other services that support it I highly recommend setting billing alarms. The sooner you can know about runaway costs, the sooner you can do something about it.

2. Highly recommend PGAnalyze (https://pganalyze.com/) if you're running Postgres in your stack. It's really intuitive, and has proven itself invaluable many times when debugging issues.

3. Having used Notion for like 7 years now, I don't think I love it as much as I used to. I feel like the "complexity" of documents gets inflated by Notion and the number of tools it gives you, and the experience of just writing text in Notion isn't super smooth IMO.

4. +1 to moving off JIRA. We moved to Shortcut years ago, I know Linear is the new hotness now.

5. I would put Datadog as an "endorse". It's certainly expensive but I feel we get loads of value out of it since we leaned so heavily into it as a central platform.

Re: Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

#210

Post by stego-tech »

Love it. Excellent reasoning for subjective decisions that don’t knock the product or solution itself as much as, “not what we specifically needed, and that’s okay”.

Bookmarked for my own infrastructure transformations. Honestly, if Okta could spit out a container or appliance that replaces on-prem ADDCs for LDAP, GPOs, and Kerberos, I’d give them all the money. They’re just so good.

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