Comment by pocketarc
13 hours ago
I agree - and it's not just what gets you promoted, but also what gets you hired, and what people look for in general.
You're looking for your first DevOps person, so you want someone who has experience doing DevOps. They'll tell you about all the fancy frameworks and tooling they've used to do Serious Business™, and you'll be impressed and hire them. They'll then proceed to do exactly that for your company, and you'll feel good because you feel it sets you up for the future.
Nobody's against it. So you end up in that situation, which even a basic home desktop would be more than capable of handling.
I have been the first (and only) DevOps person at a couple startups. I'm usually pretty guilty of NIH and wanting to develop in-house tooling to improve productivity. But more and more in my career I try to make boring choices.
Cost is usually not a huge problem beyond seed stage. Series A-B the biggest problem is growing the customer base so the fixed infra costs become a rounding error. We've built the product and we're usually focused on customer enablement and technical wins - proving that the product works 100% of the time to large enterprises so we can close deals. We can't afford weird flakiness in the middle of a POC.
Another factor I rarely see discussed is bus factor. I've been in the industry for over a decade, and I like to be able to go on vacation. It's nice to hand off the pager sometimes. Using established technologies makes it possible to delegate responsibility to the rest of the team, instead of me owning a little rats nest fiefdom of my own design.
The fact is that if 5k/month infra cost for a core part of the service sinks your VC backed startup, you've got bigger problems. Investors gave you a big pile of money to go and get customers _now_. An extra month of runway isn't going to save you.
The issue is when all the spending gets you is more complexity, maintenance, and you don't even get a performance benefit.
I once interviewed with a company that did some machine learning stuff, this was a while back when that typically meant "1 layer of weights from a regression we run overnight every night". The company asked how I had solved the complex problem of getting the weights to inference servers. I said we had a 30 line shell script that ssh'd them over and then mv'd them into place. Meanwhile the application reopened the file every so often. Zero problems with it ever. They thought I was a caveman.
I work for a small company with a handful of devs. We don't have a dedicated devops person, so I do it all. Everything is self-hosted. Been that way for years. But, yeah, if I go on vacation and something foes screwy, the business is hosed. However, even if it were hosted on AWS or elsewhere, it would not be any better. If anything, it may be worse. Instead of a person being well versed in standards based tech, they'd have to be an AWS expert. Why would we want that?
I have recently started using terraform/tofu and ansible to automate nearly all of the devops operations. We are at a point where Claude Code can use these tools and our existing configs to make configuration changes, debug issues by reviewing logs etc. It is much faster at debugging an issue than I am and I know our stuff inside and out.
I am beginning to think that AI will soon force people to rethink their cloud hosting strategy.
The issue with solutions like that is usually that people don't know how it works and how to find it if it ever stops working...
Basically discoverability is where shell script fail
7 replies →
In my experience, that $5k/month easily blows up into $100k/month
I've seen the ramifications of this "CV first" kind of engineering. Let's just say that it's a bad time when you're saddled with tech debt solely from a handful of influential people that really just wanted to work elsewhere.
I'm largely a stranger to the js world but from the outside it sure looks like projects are sharded so as to maximize npm contribution count
I'm convinced k8s is a conspiracy by bigtech to suppress startups.
So its the EJBs of this age then?