Re:Startups should run on cloud providers
by toomuchtodo on Friday August 04, 2017 @12:12PM
(#14929757)
> Hiring one dev ops person who can build infrastructure with code can get you really far when trying to save hosting costs early in a startup, plus it will cut down on technical debt later.
Before I moved into security, doing devops as a day gig and consulting, I heard this repeatedly from clients who would bring me in after they already had 8, 10, 12 developers; "we wish we had hired for devops sooner".
You wouldn't not provide your devs with a solid workstation, development tooling, etc. Why would you not provide them with an efficient CICD pipeline to enable them to have the highest development velocity possible?
Using hosted solutions (can we please stop saying cloud?) can save a lot of initial costs.
The important thing is you need to devops from the start. You need to design your base so it can be easily ported to another provider or your own. Resist the urge to use AWS or Google specific offerings.
Every large shop I've worked at has been in the process of moving off hosted solutions to save money. But they typically got to where they were thanks to being able to quickly stand up servers.
There are tools like Terraform that are suppose to make this easier, but often I ended up fighting it so much I started writing my own:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/bee2-wrestling-with-the-vultr-...
Hiring one dev ops person who can build infrastructure with code can get you really far when trying to save hosting costs early in a startup, plus it will cut down on technical debt later.