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Re:Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are in... by autotune on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @07:25PM (#19496859)
Even if they did whichever startups that end up using it would have to get a few more funding rounds :)
Re:Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are in... by davidjnelson on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @07:27PM (#19496874)
You mean heroku because of the excessive cost of over-provisioning their db plans to support traffic spikes with new products?
Re:Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are in... by autotune on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @07:58PM (#19497031)
Yes indeed. Have worked with several clients and chatted with several startups that ultimately decide to migrate off due to extremely high cost as they grow relative to other platforms.
Re:Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are in... by eldavido on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @01:38AM (#19498407)
I'm curious what language and data stack they're using? Asking because I've seen real scale (billions of devices running our software) and the real leverage is in how you architect your application (software and how the data is stored, retrieved, moves around) and things like choice of language. Not where it's hosted.

Languages like Python and Ruby are just grossly inefficient. Single-threaded, huge memory profiles, and fully synchronous I/O. Whereas in C#, Tasks and async/await probably provide no shit 10-100x the performance in both compute and concurrency. It would probably be the same deal with Go or Java.

The point is, we tend to hand-wave these kind of choices away on HN. "Just ship it, language doesn't matter". But increasingly, I think it does. You want to make a product with an aggressive free tier, where only like 1% of the user base pays, or some data-heavy analytics thing, these kinds of decisions can be make or break for a business.

Re:Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are in... by autotune on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @05:57AM (#19499384)
This isn't just one startup, these are multiple startups I have talked to that all end up deciding to move off the platform due to cost. Solid containers orchestration platforms like Kubernetes are slowly reducing the need to have one specific cloud platform, but cost control is still extremely relevant with architecture design choices.

As far as language is concerned, Ruby and Ruby on Rails is the usual choice with Heroku and is marketed specifically towards RoR devs (https://www.heroku.com/ruby) and Postgres as db. Most startups who decide to go the RoR route are not going to decide to go with C# as far as the Microsoft ecosystem is concerned, which would be a different set of architecture design choices. If you wanted to market a more performant alternative Go would 100 percent be the way to do it.

I would still somewhat disagree with your conclusion that language choice is imperative though, so much as how well you architect your application and infrastructure. A simple RoR app that pulls in a bunch of static assets from an S3 bucket is going to scale at whatever load compared to an ETL tool like Airflow that might need to process terabytes of data on a daily basis and has to have more planning from the start.

Re:Working for a startup makes less sense, unless you are in... by davidjnelson on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:13PM (#19560020)
I feel you both have fantastic insights in this. Thanks for the discussion.

My take is it’s great to use ec2 pricing, likely with beanstalk, and aurora or perhaps aurora serverless for sql. There’s room for moving fast with rails. Then as things grow, splitting off a microservice with the same url via your proxy server which uses go and redis. This way you are not over optimizing one data model before you know exactly what its schema is.