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

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31–40 of 247 posts

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

#31

> Picking Terraform over Cloudformation: Endorse I, too, prefer McDonald's cheeseburgers to ground glass mixed with rusty nails. It's not so much that I love Terraform (spelled OpenTofu) as that it's far and away the least bad tool I've used in the space.

You can honestly do a lot of what people do with Terraform now just using Docker and Ansible. I'm surprised more people don't try to. Most clouds are supported, even private clouds and stuff like MAAS.

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

#32

Using GCP gives me the same feeling as vibe-coded source code. Technically works but deeply unsettling. Unless GCP is somehow saving you boatloads of cash, AWS is much better. RDS is a very quick way to expand your bill, followed by EC2, followed by S3. RDS for production is great, but you should avoid the bizarre HN trope of "Postgres for everything" with RDS. It makes your database unnecessarily larger which expand…

> Do not enable container scanning, it just increases your bill, nobody ever looks at the scan results.

God I wish that were true. Unfortunately, ECR scanning is often cheaper and easier to start consuming than buying $giant_enterprise_scanner_du_jour, and plenty of people consider free/OSS scanners insufficient.

Stupid self inflicted problems to be sure, but far from “nobody uses ECR scanning”.

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

#34
post #26
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.

As a counterpoint, I find our AWS super team to be a mix of 40% helpful, 40% “things we say are going over their head,” 20% attempting to upsell and expand our dependence. It’s nice that we have humans but I don’t think it’s a reason to choose it or not. GCP’s architecture seems clearly better to me especially if you are looking to be global. Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of…

[dead]

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

#35
post #6

I would love to read more about the pros and cons of using a single database, if anyone has pointers to articles

Pro: every team probably needs user information, so don’t duplicate it in weird ways with uncertain consistency.

Con: it’s sadly likely that no one on your staff knows a damn thing about how an RDBMS works, and is seemingly incapable of reading documentation, so you’re gonna run into footguns faster. To be fair, this will also happen with isolated DBs, and will then be much more effort to rein in.

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

#36
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any opinion on Pulumi?

Not an opinion on Pulumi specifically, but an opinion on using imperative programming languages for infrastructure configuration: don't do it. (This includes using things like CDKTF) Infrastructure needs to be consistent, intuitive and reproducible. Imperative languages are too unconstrained. Particularly, they allow you to write code whose output is unpredictable (for example, it'd be easy to write code that creates…

yes. IaC is a misnomer. IaC implementations should have a spec (some kind of document) as the source of truth; not code.

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

#37
>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.

This post was a great read.

Tangent to this, I've always found "best practices" to be a bit of a misnomer. In most cases in software and especially devops I have found it means "pay for this product that constrains the way that you do things so you don't shoot yourself in the foot". It's not really a "practice" if you're using a product that gives you one way to do something. That said my company uses a very similar tech stack and I would choose the same one if I was starting a company tomorrow, despite the fact that, as others have mentioned, it's a ton to keep in your head all at once.

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

#38
post #21

> Picking Terraform over Cloudformation: Endorse I, too, prefer McDonald's cheeseburgers to ground glass mixed with rusty nails. It's not so much that I love Terraform (spelled OpenTofu) as that it's far and away the least bad tool I've used in the space.

Any opinion on Pulumi?

My opinion is there are not enough good software developers doing DevOps, and HCL is simple enough and can have pretty good guardrails on it. My biggest concern is people shooting themselves in the foot because the static analysis tools available for HCL don't work with Pulumi.

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

#39

> Picking Terraform over Cloudformation: Endorse I, too, prefer McDonald's cheeseburgers to ground glass mixed with rusty nails. It's not so much that I love Terraform (spelled OpenTofu) as that it's far and away the least bad tool I've used in the space.

You can honestly do a lot of what people do with Terraform now just using Docker and Ansible. I'm surprised more people don't try to. Most clouds are supported, even private clouds and stuff like MAAS.

Yeah, but ansible is one of the nine circles of hell and its support for various AWS services beyond EC2 and S3 is near nonexistant.

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

#40

I disagree on Kubernetes versus ECS. For me, the reasons to use ECS are not having to pay for a control plane, and not having to keep up with the Kubernetes upgrade treadmill.

This. k8s is primarily resume driven development in most software shops. Hardly any product or service really needs its complexity.
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