So question then - is it possible to found a tech startup without paying rent to a FAANG? Before I get the answer that anything is possible, I should say is it feasible or advisable to start a company without paying rent to the big guys?

Who would you prefer to pay rent to?

The reality is unless you’re some rich dude who can borrow dad’s datacenter (And that’s cool if so), you’re either going to be renting colo space, virtual servers, etc.

It’s always a challenge in business to avoid the trap of spending dollars to save pennies.

IMO, you’re better off working in AWS/GCP/Azure and engineering around the strengths of those platforms. That’s all about team and engineering discipline. I’m not in the startup world, but I’ve seen people lift and shift on-prem architecture and business process to cloud and set money on fire. Likewise, I’ve seen systems that reduced 5 year TCO by 80% by building to the platform strengths.

> Who would you prefer to pay rent to?

I'm aware that no man is an island in some sense, but I'm not comfortable with locking myself into one of 3 companies who need to increase their revenue by double digits year over year. And as you say, a lift and shift is basically setting money on fire. Currently I run sort of a hybrid approach with a small IaaS provider and a colo. It seems to work well for us both technically and financially though that seems to go contrary to what is considered conventional wisdom these days.

That’s awesome. The most important thing is to understand why you’re making the decisions that you do.

Where I work, we can deliver most services cheaper on-prem due to our relative scale and cloud margins. But… we’re finding that vendors in the hardware space struggle to meet their SLAs. (Look at HPE — they literally sold off their field services teams and only have 1-2 engineers covering huge geographic regions. So increasingly critical workloads make the most sense in the cloud.

If you're priorities are 'which companies do my values align with among generally very high integrity companies to begin with' - then you might want to reconsider.

Google is not evil. They're just big, and define some practices which we might think should change in the future.

Once you have the thing up and running, you can start to think about hosting your own.

Also, you don't need to use fancy services because most startups can run just fine on a single instance of whatever, meaning, there are a lot of cloud providers out there.

re: advisable

If and only if your business model depends on it. A startup's job is mostly to find product market fit; if being decoupled from AWS isn't part of your market, you are spending money on a non-problem.

There is nothing stopping you from hosting your own OpenStack, managed k8s, and all that, on your own hardware. You would need a good reason to not let someone else deal with all of this though.

For a small enough company you could even just use use k3s + offsite backups. Once you grow large enough you can setup machines in 2-4 locations across the land mass where your users exist. If you have enough than a hardware fault in one isn't an emergency and you'd be able to fly out to fix things if needed.

Realistically, on all flash, you are very unlikely to need to maintain anything on a server for a few years after deployment.

That is probably a good idea for many startups. However, once you get into the world of audits and compliance certifications, things become a lot harder. But, but then again, at this point, I suppose it is easy enough to transition to some managed hardware.