| ▲ | lewisjoe 6 days ago |
| I helped bootstrap a company that made an enterprise automation engine. The team wanted to make the service available as SaaS for boosting sales. They could have got the job done by hosting the service in a vps with a multi-tenant database schema. Instead, they went about learning kubernetes and drillingg deep into "cloud-native" stack. Spent a year trying to setup the perfect devops pipeline. Not surprisingly the company went out of business within the next few years. |
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| ▲ | rixed 6 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Not surprisingly the company went out of business within the next few years. But the engineers could find new jobs thanks to their acquired k8s experience. |
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| ▲ | joshmn 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is my experience too—there’s too much time wasted trying to solve a problem that might exist 5 years down the road. So many projects and early-stage companies would be just fine either with a PaaS or nginx in front of a docker container. You’ll know when you hit your pain point. |
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| ▲ | cpursley 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Yep, this is why I'm a proponent of paas until the bill actually hurts. Just pay the heroku/render/fly tax and focus on product market fit. Or, play with servers and K8s, burning your investors money, then move on to the next gig and repeat... |
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| ▲ | Aeolun 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The moment I sign up for a PaaS the bill hurts. I can never get over the fact I can get 1000x more compute for the same price, never mind that I never use it and have to set everything up myself. I’ll just never pay to lock myself in to something so restricted. My dedicated server allows me to do anything I want or need. | | |
| ▲ | cpursley 5 days ago | parent [-] | | If you enjoy playing with servers instead of shipping features, enjoy! | | |
| ▲ | Aeolun 4 days ago | parent [-] | | That’s only true if you still have to learn how to deploy to a server. I have the opposite problem. I need to learn how to deploy to these wonky services, and it never seems to transfer from one to the other. | | |
| ▲ | cpursley 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I moved from Heroku -> to Render.com in a day, then later Render -> Fly in a couple hours because everything was already dockerized. I’ve never really have to think about my servers on any of these providers, they just run. |
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| ▲ | DaSHacka 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Or, play with servers and K8s, burning your investors money, then move on to the next gig and repeat... I mean, of the two, the PaaS route certainly burns more money, the exception being the rare shop that is so incompetent they can't even get their own infrastructure configured correctly, like in GP's situation. There are guaranteed more shops that would be better off self-hosting and saving on their current massive cloud bills than the rare one-offs that actually save so much time using cloud services, it takes them from bankruptcy to being functional. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 6 days ago | parent [-] | | > the PaaS route certainly burns more money, Does it? Vercel is $20/month and Neon starts at $5/month. That obviously goes up as you scale up, but $25/month seems like a fairly cheap place to start to me. (I don't work for Vercel or Neon, just a happy customer) | | |
| ▲ | cpursley 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, also a happy neon customer - but they can get pricy. Still prefer them over AWS. For compute, Fly is pretty competitive. | | |
| ▲ | theaniketmaurya 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I’m using Neon too and upgraded to the scale up version today. Curious, what do you mean rhat they can get pricey? | | |
| ▲ | Aeolun 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Like, you keep your server running for a month and you need to pay $255 pricey? I can get about 64 cores of dedicated compute for the price of a single neon compute (4c/16gb) unit. And that’s before you factor in 500gb of storage. | | |
| ▲ | cpursley 5 days ago | parent [-] | | And how much time are you spending babysitting all of this? What’s your upgrade, deploy and rollback story? Because I don’t have to even think about these things. |
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| ▲ | fragmede 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, same. Vercel + Neon and then if you actually have customers and actually end up paying them enough money that it becomes significant, then you can refactor and move platforms, but until you do, there are bigger fish to fry. | | |
| ▲ | matt-p 6 days ago | parent [-] | | 100%. Making it a docker container and deploying it is literally a few hours at most. |
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