This is supposed to be a contrarian opinion yet this is a retoric yapped non-stop in the “build in public” community. Of course lean is a good approach, it makes sense, and most engineers know this. Is not a new concept, we’ve been doing this for years in every branch of engineering.

The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist. This is just a story repeated ad nauseam to fit a narrative that help them justify their choices. This position is just as dogmatic, if not more, than the alleged dogma it attempts to disrupt.

Smart technical leaders knows that technical decisions only matter in context never in absolutes. The right answer is always “it depends”.

I can agree that there is a tendency to prematurely optimize infra, as a direct consequence of lack of measuring especially in young busy startups. One could argue that premature optimization might be the smart choice when you don’t have enough data, as in the best case scenario (your startup do well) you’ve saved some time, worst case scenario you’ve lost some money that depending on the situation might be less valuable than time spent in maintaining, and later refactoring, infra.

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abujazar 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've seen A LOT of public sector projects starting out with loads of Azure services and >$3000 montly bills for applications that could've easily run on a single VM.

	▲	nerder92 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This a structural problem not an awareness one. Is not like they don’t know they can run it on a 5$ VPS, the problem is that there are no incentives to do so. You’d be surprised to know how much of engineering is there to address organisational challenges rather than technical ones (ie: micro-services)

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ethbr1 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The invented “people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist.

Can confirm it exists, especially with founders self-coding with LLMs now.

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matt_s 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I recall reading multiple AskHN posts about people trying to get attention from a cloud provider because they ran up thousands of dollars in charges accidentally. I've seen large companies do this too, even if you think something is just a dev environment, its the cloud provider's production environment and they will charge you per their ToS for everything you use, doesn't matter what the customer usage profile looks like.

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skeeter2020 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Experienced dev with limited hands-on big tech infrastructure experience. Based on the results I get from LLMs in domains I understand how get they even get this stuff running using AI?

	▲	ethbr1 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Monkeys and typewriters. Throw enough character input and "It's not working" into an LLM and it will eventually produce... something. And since it tends to reach for the most web-represented solution, that means infinite redis caches doing the same thing, k8s, and/or Vercel. Best mental model: imagine something that produces great tactical architecture, with zero strategic architecture, running in a loop.

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nerder92 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I can accept this is true, they will for sure exist. Of course if this they ability to make choices, technical or not, they are completely doomed.

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wesammikhail 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

“people start with a k8s cluster for 5 users” doesn’t really exist

Most people in the BiP these days barely know how to deploy a database or host something using nginx. it's all vercel, supabase, aws, clerk, yada yada. Cost aside, I think that people are addicted to complexity.