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Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

• spprashant 7mo ago
  I have seen this post before. I don't know what exactly they do, but that's an extraordinary list of products to be managing. I hope they are making enough revenue to cover those outrageous costs.
• robszumski 7mo ago
  Thanks for sharing, really helpful to see your thinking. I haven't fully embraced FaaS myself but never regretted it either. Curious to hear more about Renovate vs Dependabot. Is it complicated to debug _why_ it's making a choice to upgrade from A to B? Working on a tool to do app-specific breaking change analysis so winning trust and being transparent about what is happening is top of mind. When were you using quay.io? In the pre-CoreOS years, CoreOS years (2014-2018), or the Red Hat years?
• econner 7mo ago
  It's weird that one of the reasons that you endorse AWS is that you had regular meetings with your account manager but then you regret premium support which is the whole reason you had regular meetings with your account manager.
  • unsnap_biceps 7mo ago
    If you spend enough (or they think you'll spend enough), you'll get an account manager without the premium support contract, especially early in the onboarding
    • necubi 7mo ago
      Or if you’re a newish startup who they hope will eventually spend enough to justify it.
  • dangus 7mo ago
    As a counterpoint, I find our AWS super team to be a mix of 40% helpful, 40% “things we say are going over their head,” 20% attempting to upsell and expand our dependence. It’s nice that we have humans but I don’t think it’s a reason to choose it or not. GCP’s architecture seems clearly better to me especially if you are looking to be global. Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare. GCP’s use of folders makes way more sense. GCP having global VPCs is also potentially a huge benefit if you want your users to hit servers that are physically close to them. On AWS you have to architect your own solution with global accelerator which becomes even more insane if you need to cross accounts, which you’ll probably have to do eventually because of the aforementioned insanity of AWS account/organization best practices.
    • wetpaws 7mo ago
      [dead]
    • danpalmer 7mo ago
      Similar to my experience with the two. We didn't have regular meetings with our GCP account manager, but they did help us and we had a technical support rep there we were in contact with sometimes. We rarely heard from anyone at AWS, and a friend had some horror stories of reporting security issues to AWS. Architecturally I'd go with GCP in a heartbeat. Bigquery was also one of the biggest wins in my previous role. Completely changed out business for almost everyone, vs Redshift which cost us a lot of money to learn that it sucked. You could say I'm biased as I work at Google (but not on any of this), but for me it was definitely the other way around, I joined Google in part because of the experience of using GCP and migrating AWS workloads to in.
    • UltraSane 7mo ago
      Global VPCs are very nice but they feel like a single blast radius.
      • dangus 7mo ago
        Whether or not your VPC can have subnets in multiple regions is entirely unrelated to security.
  • rco8786 7mo ago
    The regret was about the cost of the premium support
  • h1fra 7mo ago
    I never got this in the comparison of aws between gcp. Why do people need direct support that much? In 8 years, I had to reach out to GCP maybe twice and still got an answer anyway.
    • JoeBOFH 7mo ago
      With my experience it’s the edge cases. The few times I had to reach out to AWS support were due to some weird edge case we couldn’t fix but AWS had to. And having a rep involved made it so much smoother.
      • h1fra 7mo ago
        I had to reach AWS because of a bug in Aurora last year; they replied quickly but said that they couldn't understand the bug...
    • sandorscribbles 7mo ago
      if you need to bump a quota above the predetermined range of what googlers think is "normal" usage (which is far too low to run anything at scale)you have to talk to a human to negotiate the quota bump. why? because googlers in their infinite engineering wisdom use "gcp quotas" not as a cost optimization guardrail for customers benefit, but to inform google on when and how much metal they need to buy for their datacenter region you are running in.
      • verst 7mo ago
        I have to defend the Googlers here (I work at a different hyperscaler). Teams / services need to optimize their COGS. That means optimizing infrastructure cost. A lot of pay as you go service may not have any base cost to customers but they require some infrastructure to be provisioned. Without quotas you can have a lot of provisioned infrastructure which does not produce any revenue to even collectively break even. Just yesterday this a decision we evaluated again in my team. As a team we cannot afford an unlimited quota - both because of what that would do to our bottom line and because we can't necessarily obtain all the quotas we need ourselves to provision enough capacity for our dependencies. It's a difficult trade off requiring manual intervention.
  • sandorscribbles 7mo ago
    googlers in their infinite wisdom have built a startup ecosystem for gcp that assigns "startups" to entry level new hires who are scrambling to figure out how to be managers of accounts while learning how to talk to humans, because googlers are generally not used to interacting with humans, just code, and that is the result of the programmatic hiring/screening process. each newly hired 20-something is also assigned 3,000 gcp accounts to manage. what is the engineering used to determine a weak startup from a growing company you ask? well....googlers again use random numbers not logic (human interaction avoidance firewall) to determine that and set the floor at $30M "publicly declared investment capital". so what happens when you the gcp architect consultant hired to help this successful startup productionalize their gcp infra but their last round was private? google tells the soon to be $100M success company they are not real yet.....so they go get their virtual cpu,ram,disk from aws who knows how to treat customers right by being able to talk to humans by hiring account managers who pick up the phone and invite you to lunch to talk about your successful startup growing on aws. googlers are the biggest risk factor to the far superior gcp infrastructure for any business, startup or fortune 10.
    • sharts 7mo ago
      having used gcp, i don’t think anything they do is far superior
  • mannyv 7mo ago
    If you know what you're doing you don't need AWS support. We add support when we want to do something new, like MediaTailor + SSAI. At that point we're exploring and trying to get our heads around how things work. Once it works there's no real point in support. That said, you need to ask your account manager about (1) discounts in exchange for spend commitments, and (2) technical assistance. In general we have a talk with our AM when we're doing something new, and they rope in SMEs from the various products for us. We're not that big, and I haven't worked for large companies, and it's always been a mystery to me why people have problems dealing with AWS. I've always found them to be super responsive and easy to get ahold of. OTOH we actually know what we're doing technically. Google Cloud, OTOH, is super fucked up. I mean seriously, I doubt anyone there has any idea WTF is happening or how anything works anymore. There's no real cohesion, or at least there wasn't the last time I was abused by GCP.
    • nucleardog 7mo ago
      > That said, you need to ask your account manager about (1) discounts in exchange for spend commitments, and (2) technical assistance. Depending what precisely you mean by the second one, you may not even need an AM/support for that. They won't help me use the platform, but they will still address issues with the platform. If you run into bugs, things not behaving how they're documented, or something that simply isn't exposed/available to customers they seem to be pretty good about getting it resolved regardless of your spend or support level. (On my personal account with minimal spend, no AM, and no support... I've had engineers from the relevant teams email me directly after submitting a ticket for issues.) So yeah, "if you know what you're doing" you probably don't even need the paid-for support.
    • darth_avocado 7mo ago
      > If you know what you're doing you don't need AWS support. Hard disagree. I have to engage with AWS support almost once every 6 months. A lot of them end up being bugs identified in their services. Premium support is extremely valuable when your production services are down and you need to get them back up asap.
• jrjeksjd8d 7mo ago
  I see you regret Datadog but there's no alternative - did you end up homebrewing metrics, or are you just living with their insane pricing model? In my experience they suck but not enough to leave.
  • stackskipton 7mo ago
    Not author but Prometheus is perfectly acceptable alternative if you don't want to go whole Otel route.
    • t-writescode 7mo ago
      Prometheus + … what? Datadog is a visualization platform, prometheus is a data gathering infrastructure.
      • stackskipton 7mo ago
        Grafana is most common one.
  • lelandbatey 7mo ago
    Currently going through leaving DD at work. Many potential options, many companies trying to break in. The one that calls to me spiritually is: throw it all in Clickhouse (hosted Clickhouse is shockingly cheap) with a hosted HyperDX (logs and metrics UI) instance in front of it. HyperDX has its issues, but it's shocking how cheap it is to toss a couple hundred TB of logs/metrics into Clickhouse per month (compared to the kings ransom DD charges). And you can just query the raw rows, which really comes in handy for understanding some in-the-weeds metrics questions.
  • jpgvm 7mo ago
    VictoriaMetrics stack. Better, cheaper, faster queries, more k8s native, etc. Easy to run with budget saved from not being on Datadog + attracts smart and observability minded engineers to your team.
  • velocity3230 7mo ago
• calmbonsai 7mo ago
  This is the best post to HN in quite some time. Kudos to the detailed and structured break-down. If the author had a Ko-Fi they would've just earned $50 USD from me. I've been thinking of making the leap away from JIRA and I concur on RDS, Terraform for IAC, and FaaS whenever possible. Google support is non-existent and I only recommend GC for pure compute. I hear good things about Big Table, but I've never used in in production. I disagree on Slack usage aside from the postmortem automation. Slack is just gonna' be messy no matter what policies are put in place.
  • unethical_ban 7mo ago
    What do you use if not slack? OPs advice is standard best practice. Respect peoples time by not expecting immediate response, and use team or function based channels as much as possible. Other options are email of course, and what, teams for instant messages?
    • jasonpeacock 7mo ago
      The bullet points for using Slack basically describe email (and distribution lists). It’s funny how we get an instant messaging platform and derive best practices that try to emulate a previous technology. Btw, email is pretty instant.
      • unethical_ban 7mo ago
        I get it, email accomplishes a lot. But it "feels" like a place these days for one-off group chats, especially for people from different organizations. Realtime chat has its places and can also step in to that email role within a team. All my opinion, none too strongly held.
      • nottorp 7mo ago
        If you work in a team, email is limited to the people you cc: while a convo in a slack channel can have people you didn't think of jump in* with information. See the other point in the article about discouraging one on one private messages and encouraging public discussion. That is the main reason. * half a day later or days later if you do true async, but that's fine.
• zem 7mo ago
  I would love to read more about the pros and cons of using a single database, if anyone has pointers to articles
  • stackskipton 7mo ago
    SRE here who has dealt with this before. Everything in article is excellent point but other big point is schema changes become extremely difficult because you have unknown applications possibly relying on that schema. It's also at certain point, the database becomes absolutely massive and you will need teams of DBAs care and feeding it.
    • x3n0ph3n3 7mo ago
      Not only will you need a team of DBAs caring for it, but you'll never be able to hire them.
      • hobs 7mo ago
        No organization I have seen prioritizes a DBA's requirements, concerns, or approach. They certainly don't pay them enough to deal with that bullshit, so I was out.
    • jghn 7mo ago
      This is true. But at the same time people need to understand that most companies will never hit that certain point. It's a matter of if, not when. Everyone tries to plan for a world where they've become one of the hyperscalers. Better to optimize for the much more likely scenarios.
      • stackskipton 7mo ago
        We were not a hyperscaler, we were boring company that you never heard of. Database is still 40TB with 3200 stored procedures.
        • 7mo ago
• weedhopper 7mo ago
  Great post. I even wouldn’t mind more details, especially about datadog, or as others pointed out, the kind of contradiction with aws support.
• mwcampbell 7mo ago
  I disagree on Kubernetes versus ECS. For me, the reasons to use ECS are not having to pay for a control plane, and not having to keep up with the Kubernetes upgrade treadmill.
  • x3n0ph3n3 7mo ago
    This. k8s is primarily resume driven development in most software shops. Hardly any product or service really needs its complexity.
    • jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
      The amount of tools and systems here that work because of k8s is signficiant. K8s is a control plane and an integration plane. I wish luck to the imo fools chasing the "you may not need it" logic. The vacuum that attitude creates in its wake demands many many many complex & gnarly home-cooked solutions. Can you? Sure, absolutely! But you are doing that on your own, glueing it all together every step of the way. There's no other glue layer anywhere remotely as integrative, that can universally bind to so much. The value is astronomical, imho.
    • karolist 7mo ago
      To replace Kubernetes, you inevitably have to reinvent Kubernetes. By the time you build in canaries, blue/green deployments, and rolling updates with precise availability controls, you've just built a bespoke version of k8s. I'll take the industry standard over a homegrown orchestration tool any day.
      • secondcoming 7mo ago
        We've used ECS back when we were on AWS, and now GCE. We didn't have to invent any homegrown orchestration tool. Our infra is hundreds of VMs across 4 regions. Can you give an example of what you needed to do?
        • stackskipton 7mo ago
• kstrauser 7mo ago
  > Picking Terraform over Cloudformation: Endorse I, too, prefer McDonald's cheeseburgers to ground glass mixed with rusty nails. It's not so much that I love Terraform (spelled OpenTofu) as that it's far and away the least bad tool I've used in the space.
  • walt_grata 7mo ago
    I've been very happy using cdk for interacting with aws. Much better than terraform and the like.
    • etothet 7mo ago
      I second this. I do use some terraform, but for most of our stacks, CDK has been fantastic.
  • nine_k 7mo ago
    Any opinion on Pulumi?
    • gouggoug 7mo ago
      Not an opinion on Pulumi specifically, but an opinion on using imperative programming languages for infrastructure configuration: don't do it. (This includes using things like CDKTF) Infrastructure needs to be consistent, intuitive and reproducible. Imperative languages are too unconstrained. Particularly, they allow you to write code whose output is unpredictable (for example, it'd be easy to write code that creates a resources based on the current time of day...). With infrastructure, you want predictability and reproducibility. You want to focus more on writing _what_ your infra should look like, less _how_ to get there.
      • popalchemist 7mo ago
        yes. IaC is a misnomer. IaC implementations should have a spec (some kind of document) as the source of truth; not code.
      • 7mo ago
• 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
  Using GCP gives me the same feeling as vibe-coded source code. Technically works but deeply unsettling. Unless GCP is somehow saving you boatloads of cash, AWS is much better. RDS is a very quick way to expand your bill, followed by EC2, followed by S3. RDS for production is great, but you should avoid the bizarre HN trope of "Postgres for everything" with RDS. It makes your database unnecessarily larger which expands your bill. Use it strategically and your cost will remain low while also being very stable and easy to manage. You may still end up DIYing backups. Aurora Serverless v2 is another useful way to reduce bill. If you want to do custom fancy SQL/host/volume things, RDS Custom may enable it. I'm starting to think Elasticache is a code smell. I see teams adopt it when they literally don't know why they're using it. Similar to the "Postgres for everything" people, they're often wasteful, causing extra cost and introducing more complexity for no benefit. If you decide to use Elasticache, Valkey Serverless is the cheapest option. Always use ECR in AWS. Even if you have some enterprise artifact manager with container support... run your prod container pulls with ECR. Do not enable container scanning, it just increases your bill, nobody ever looks at the scan results. I no longer endorse using GitHub Actions except for non-business-critical stuff. I was bullish early on with their Actions ecosystem, but the whole thing is a mess now, from the UX to the docs to the features and stability. I use it for my OSS projects but that's it. Most managed CI/CD sucks. Use Drone.io for free if you're small, use WoodpeckerCI otherwise. Buying an IP block is a complicated and fraught thing (it may not seem like it, but eventually it is). Buy reserved IPs from AWS, keep them as long as you want, you never have to deal with strange outages from an RIR not getting the correct contact updated in the correct amount of time or some foolishness. He mentions K8s, and it really is useful, but as a staging and dev environment. For production you run into the risk of insane complexity exploding, and the constant death march of upgrades and compatibility issues from the 12 month EOL; I would not recommend even managed K8s for prod. But for staging/dev, it's fantastic. Give your devs their own namespace (or virtual cluster, ideally) and they can go hog wild deploying infrastructure and testing apps in a protected private environment. You can spin up and down things much easier than typical AWS infra (no need for terraform, just use Helm) with less risk, and with horizontal autoscaling that means it's easier to save money. Compare to the difficulty of least-privilege in AWS IAM to allow experiments; you're constantly risking blowing up real infra. Helm is a perfectly acceptable way to quickly install K8s components, big libraries of apps out there on https://artifacthub.io/ https://artifacthub.io/. A big advantage is its atomic rollouts which makes simple deploy/rollback a breeze. But ExternalSecrets is one of the most over-complicated annoying garbage projects I've ever dealt with. It's useful, but I will fight hard to avoid it in future. There are multiple ways to use it with arcane syntax, yet it actually lacks some useful functionality. I spent way too much time trying to get it to do some basic things, and troubleshooting it is difficult. Beware. I don't see a lot of architectural advice, which is strange. You should start your startup out using all the AWS well-architected framework that could possibly apply to your current startup. That means things like 1) multiple AWS accounts (the more the better) with a management account & security account, 2) identity center SSO, no IAM users for humans, 3) reserved CIDRs for VPCs, 4) transit gateway between accounts, 5) hard-split between stage & prod, 6) openvpn or wireguard proxy on each VPC to get into private networks, 7) tagging and naming standards and everything you build gets the tags, 8) put in management account policies and cloudtrail to enforce limitations on all the accounts, to do things like add default protections and auditing. If you're thinking "well my startup doesn't need that" - only if your startup dies will you not need it, and it will be an absolute nightmare to do it later (ever changed the wheels on a moving bus before?). And if you plan on working for more than one startup in your life, doing it once early on means it's easier the second time. Finally if you think "well that will take too long!", we have AI now, just ask it to do the thing and it'll do it for you.
• Grimburger 7mo ago
  > There are no great FaaS options for running GPU workloads Knative on k8s works well for us, there's some oddities about it but in general does the job
• kaycey2022 7mo ago
  Feels like a minor glimpse into what's involved in running tech companies these days. Sure this list could be much simpler, but then so would the scope of the company's offerings. So AI would offer enough accountability to replace all of this? Agents juggling million token contexts? It's kind of hard to wrap my head around.
  • nine_k 7mo ago
    Agents run tools, too. You can make an LLM count by the means of language processing, but it's much more efficient to let it run a Python script. By the same token, it's more efficient to let an LLM operate all these tools (and more) than to force an LLM to keep all of that on its "mind", that is, context.
    • kaycey2022 7mo ago
      Agents are just not deterministic. You will see wierd things like in one thread an agent simply says it cannot access a CLI tool for whatever reason. You inspect the call, it worked just fine in another thread. You eventually shrug your shoulders and close the thread, pick up from another instead of having the agent flail around some obvious BS for hours and hours. Just because they can run tools, doesn't mean they run them reliably. Running tools is not a be all and end all of the problem. Amdahl's law is still in play when it comes to agents orchestrating entire business processes on their own.
      • cindyllm 7mo ago
        [dead]
• ink_13 7mo ago
  (2024) Just FYI article is two years old
• dangoodmanUT 7mo ago
  > There are no great FaaS options for running GPU workloads, which is why we could never go fully FaaS. modal.com???
• kolja005 7mo ago
  >Since the database is used by everyone, it becomes cared for by no one. Startups don’t have the luxury of a DBA, and everything owned by no one is owned by infrastructure eventually. This post was a great read. Tangent to this, I've always found "best practices" to be a bit of a misnomer. In most cases in software and especially devops I have found it means "pay for this product that constrains the way that you do things so you don't shoot yourself in the foot". It's not really a "practice" if you're using a product that gives you one way to do something. That said my company uses a very similar tech stack and I would choose the same one if I was starting a company tomorrow, despite the fact that, as others have mentioned, it's a ton to keep in your head all at once.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • dogleash 7mo ago
    > In most cases in software and especially devops I have found it means "pay for this product that constrains the way that you do things so you don't shoot yourself in the foot". It's not really a "practice" if you're using a product that gives you one way to do something. The good thing about a lot of devops saas is that you're not paying anyone on staff to understand the problem domain and guide your team. The bad thing is that you're not paying anyone on staff to understand the problem domain and guide your team.
• neo_doom 7mo ago
  > Regret: Not adopting an identity platform early on. I stuck with Google Workspace at the start... I've worked with hundreds of customers to integrate IdP's with our application and Google Workspace was by far the worst of the big players (Entra ID, Okta, Ping). Its extremely inflexible for even the most basic SAML configuration. Stay far, far away.
  • 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
    And it's a horrible moat. I've gotten locked out of a Google Workspace permanently because the person who set it up left, used a personal email/phone to do it, and despite us owning/controlling the domain, Google wouldn't unlock admin access to the Workspace for us, they would only delete it. Unacceptable business risk.
    • Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
      Holy moly. this is nightmare fuel.
• jbmsf 7mo ago
  Thanks. I've been meaning to write one of these for a long time, but you went into detail in a very effective, organized way. I also reached a lot of similar decisions and challenges, even where we differ (ECS vs EKS) I completely understand your conclusions.
• wavemode 7mo ago
  (2024) past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39313623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39313623
  • tomhow 7mo ago
    Thanks! Macroexpanded... Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39313623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39313623 - Feb 2024 (626 comments)
  • Meetvelde 7mo ago
    thanks. Pretty sure this is where I saved it from originally.
• jmward01 7mo ago
  You will never agree 100% with someone else when it comes to decisions like this, but clearly there is a lot of history behind these decisions and they are a great starting point for conversations internally I think.
• nevalainen 7mo ago
  There is a lot of "stuff" for liking to keep it simple. Great article though!
• themafia 7mo ago
  > “This EC2 instance type running 24/7 at full load is way less expensive than a Lambda running”. For the same amount of memory they should cost _nearly_ identical. Run the numbers. They're not significantly different services. Aside from this you do NOT pay for IPv4 when using Lambda, you do on EC2, and so Lambda is almost always less expensive.
  • nijave 7mo ago
    I'm curious how that plays out when you factor in other infrastructure components like DB and load balancers. On Lambda, load balancing is handled out of the box but you may need to introduce things like connection poolers for the DB you could have gotten away without on EC2 Think it also depends if you're CPU or memory constrained. Lambda seemed more expensive for CPU heavy workloads since you're stuck with certain CPU:mem ratios and there's more flexibility on EC2 instance types
    • themafia 7mo ago
      I wouldn't know. I use DynamoDB almost exclusively. These simply aren't considerations that occur with that product. It is true that it can be hard to size workloads into lambdas rather unusual CPU configuration; however, the real beauty of lambda is, you can just fork several parallel copies of your function. We can sometimes fork up to 250 instances just for a single "job." If you're in the same boat we are where your workloads parallelize easily then Lambda has been incredibly cost effective for this use case.
      • nijave 7mo ago
        We're on k8s and a lot of our Lambdas are Docker images so it's fairly trivial to throw the same thing on k8s with a pod autoscaler for instances and cluster autoscaler to add nodes.
• SoftTalker 7mo ago
  After listing dozens of infrastructure products/projects, "My general infrastructure advice is “less is better”. That made me laugh. Yes I get that they probably didn't use all of these at the same time.
  • movedx 7mo ago
    > less is better Goes on to use Kubernetes and entire GitOps stacks to run a process. I truly do wonder what difficulty there is in transferring a binary to the system and writing a system unit file and being done with it.
• gnarbarian 7mo ago
  given enough time you may regret every single one of them.
• rixed 7mo ago
  Sure, let's take advices about infrastructure from that guy wo needs a tool to automate postmortems.
  • mlrtime 7mo ago
    Can you expand? Have you never worked at a tech company that has incidents? In which world does a large tech company exist without problems, if so how big, how many customers etc?
• bigiain 7mo ago
  I initially read this wrong as "Almost every infrastructure decision I make I regret after 4 years", and I nodded my head in agreement. I've been working mostly at startups most of my career (for Sydney Australia values of "start up" which mostly means "small and new or new-ish business using technology", not the Silicon Valley VC money powered moonshot crapshoot meaning). Two of those roles (including the one I'm in now) have been longer that a decade. And it's pretty much true that almost all infrastructure (and architecture) decisions are things that 4-5 years later become regrets. Some standouts from 30 years: I didn't choose Macromind/Macromedia Director in '94 but that was someone else's decision I regretted 5 years later. I shouldn't have chosen to run a web business on ISP web hosting and Perl4 in '95 (yay /cgi-bin). I shouldn't have chosen globally colocated desktop pc linux machines and MySQL in '98/99 (although I got a lot of work trips and airline miles out of that). I shouldn't have chosen Python2 in 2007, or even worse Angular2 in 2011. I _probably_ shouldn't have chosen Arch Linux (and a custom/bastardised Pacman repo) for a hardware startup in 2013. I didn't choose Groovy on Grails in 2014 but I regretted being recruited into being responsible for it by 2018 or so. I shouldn't have chosen Java/MySQL in 2019 (or at least I should have kept a much tighter leash on the backend team and their enterprise architecture astronaut). The other perspective on all those decisions though, each of them allowed a business to do the things they needed to take money off customers (I know I know, that's not the VC startup way...) Although I regretted each of those later, even in retrospect I think I made decent pragmatic choices at the time. And at this stage of my career I've become happy enough knowing that every decision is probably going to have regrets over a 4 or 5 year timeframe, but that most projects never last long enough for you to get there - either the business doesn't pass out and closes the project down, or a major ground up rewrite happens for reasons often unrelated to 5 year old infrastructure or architecture choices.
• ttoinou 7mo ago
  Nice but how do those services combine with each others ? How do you combine notion, slack, your git hosting, linear and your CI/CD ? If there are only URLs between each others it’s hard to link all the work together
• gib444 7mo ago
  Infra guys doing DBA is a nightmare in my experience (usually clueless and it gets loved less than more sexy parts of infra). Devs too Hire a DBA ASAP. They need to reign in also the laziness of all other developers when designing and interacting with the DB. The horrors a dev can create in the DB can take years to undo
  • phrotoma 7mo ago
    As an infra person I couldn't agree more. Get an expert in there. DB's are their own universe of complexity and deserve dedicated attention.
  • nijave 7mo ago
    I'm a little afraid to say it but LLMs are getting quite good at query optimization. They can also read slow query logs and use extensions like pg_stat_statements Doesn't necessarily prevent a terrible schema but it's become a lot easier to fix abomination queries at least
• lightyrs 7mo ago
  Interested to know what's changed (if anything) in the two years since this was written.
  • hambes 7mo ago
    for one thing the ingress nginx is retiring[1], so they're probably revsiting alternatives, maybe even the service meshes for the new gateway api. 1: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2026/01/29/ingress-nginx-statement/ https://kubernetes.io/blog/2026/01/29/ingress-nginx-statemen...
• MaXtreeM 7mo ago
  Previous discussion (626 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39313623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39313623
• rf15 7mo ago
  > Startups don’t have the luxury of a DBA but... you are spending so much on AWS and premium support... surely you can afford that
  • enviwje97 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  • Lucasoato 7mo ago
    Self managing a database vs getting RDS isn't an easy choice. It depends on the scale, it depends on the industry... if you're locked in already in AWS, the price difference between the bare machines vs RDS usually aren't enough to pay for another person. If you're starting everything from scratch, you might think that going to other providers (like Hetzner) is a good idea, and it may definitely be! But then you need to set up a Site2Site VPN because the second big customer of your B2B SaaS startup uses on-premises infrastructure and AWS has that out of the box, while you need an expert networking guy to do that the right way on Hetzner.
  • happymellon 7mo ago
    The last startup I was with that used AWS didn't spend anything on premium support. We were given startup credits to apply to our accounts, and they were always happy to hand out more to get us hooked.
  • zie 7mo ago
    They have a DBA in their infrastructure team, they just didn't bother to tell anyone and let them own it.
  • darth_avocado 7mo ago
    Most startups don’t need a dba, just competent full stack/backend engineers. That being said, I understand why many startups prefer having a dba. Not exactly fun when your only staff engineer likes to just store everything in a jsonb column in Postgres.
  • winrid 7mo ago
    Sure we'll just spend 500k/yr for rds instead with networked disks lmao
• piokoch 7mo ago
  I've just look out of curiosity on Appsmith, as the author endorsed this tool as some admin panel builder. I had to double check the name, as right now this is, surprise, surprise, AI powered application builder... I used to use Replit for educational purposes, to be able to create simple programs in any language and share them with others (teachers, students). That was really useful. Now Replit is a frontend to some AI chat that is supposed to write software for me. Is this jumping into AI bandwagon everywhere a new trend? Is this really needed? Is this really profitable?
  • hare2eternity 7mo ago
    Just about anyone who aspires to raise capital in the current market is making themselves out to be AI. Give it a couple of years and we'll be onto the next craze. By that time I should have migrated my application off the blockchain into the metaverse.
• mettamage 7mo ago
  As a non infra guy I'll say this. I'm curious about Linear. At my own company I vibecoded my own project management app against the JIRA API because I can't stand our version of JIRA. It's too many clicks, too many things to remember and it's unintuitive.
  • ubercore 7mo ago
    Been incredibly happy with the speed, featureset, and pace of new (good) features in Linear. Our team has adopted it quite happily and it gets a ton of good use. Can fully recommend.
  • phrotoma 7mo ago
    Baffling piece of software. It's a task manager and every time I use it I flail around for ages trying to figure out how to mark a task completed. No idea why people like it.
    • stackskipton 7mo ago
      Because the customers are hordes of PMs and other types who can use as tool to be taskmaster over hordes of developers. It's Amazon warehouse worker tracking software for developers and thus we hate it.
  • AIorNot 7mo ago
    As everyone knows JIRA sucks but some perfect implementation of it exists in the ether at some company you will never work at :) Theses days AI in doc, spec and production lifecycle means we need AI first ticket tooling - haven’t used Linear but I suspect that works far better with AI then JIRA
    • mettamage 7mo ago
      I actually know people that like JIRA believe it or not, both software engineers
  • nicoburns 7mo ago
    If you have the power to do so, get rid of JIRA immediately. There are like 10 competitors that are all dramatically better. I would personally recommend https://www.shortcut.com https://www.shortcut.com which is very well designed, and also made some really sensible improvements over the time that we used it.
• bob1029 7mo ago
  > Not using Function as a Service(FaaS) more FaaS is almost certainly a mistake. I get the appeal from an accountant's perspective, but from a debugging and development perspective it's really fucking awful compared to using a traditional VM. Getting at logs in something like azure functions is a great example of this. I pushed really hard for FaaS until I had to support it. It's the worst kind of trap. I still get sweaty thinking about some of the issues we had with it.
  • CodesInChaos 7mo ago
    What's the issue with logging? I would have expected stdout/stderr to get automatically transferred to the providers managed logging solution (e.g. cloudwatch). Though I never really understood the appeal of FaaS over something like Google-Cloud-Run.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • bruce343434 7mo ago
      As a developer who spent a couple months developing a microservice using aws lambda functions: it SUCKS. There's no interactive debugging. Deploy for a minute or 5 depending on the changes, then trigger the lambda, wait another 5 minutes for all the logs to show up. Then proceed with printf/stack trace debugging. For reasons that I forgot, locally running the lambda code on my dev box was not applicable. Locally deploying the cloud environment neither. I wasn't around for the era but I imagine it's like working on an ancient mainframe with long compile times and a very slow printer.
      • AIorNot 7mo ago
        Lol exactly
      • icedchai 7mo ago
        I've witnessed developers editing Lambda code live in the AWS console. It is extremely painful to watch.
• isoprophlex 7mo ago
  > There are no great FaaS options for running GPU workloads I love modal. I think they got FaaS for GPU exactly right, both in terms of their SDK and the abstractions/infra they provide.
• stroebs 7mo ago
  The Bottlerocket issues really surprise me - not an experience I've shared even with heavy use. I use EKS with Bottlerocket + managed addons + Karpenter, and our security team is super happy that _nobody_ has access to the underlying nodes. Immutable OS is a key selling point, and Brupop "just works" to keep everything up to date without any input. Patching nodes is something I haven't had to think about in almost a year.
• prplfsh 7mo ago
  I feel so many of these. LOL @ GitHub endorse-ish, more -ish every day now. Overall though seems like a pretty good hit rate. Surprised to see datadog as a regret - it is expensive but it's been enormously useful for us. Though we don't run kubernetes, so perhaps my baseline of expensive is wrong.
• sylens 7mo ago
  The part about account teams for AWS and GCP is very true in my experience. I could tell my AWS account team that I was hungry and they would offer to bring me a bagel in an hour. My GCP account team no-shows our cadence calls and somehow forgets the one question I ask them in the intervening time between our calls, which means each month I get to re-explain the issue as they pretend to escalate it again.
• AIorNot 7mo ago
  Its insane how many SaaS solutions are needed piecemeal to run a company these days - just listing everything out like that made it apparent
  • YetAnotherNick 7mo ago
    And it's just infra, tech stack comes after it.
• yakkomajuri 7mo ago
  > "Like most tech debt, we didn’t make this decision, we just did not not make this decision." This is an important point.
  • perrygeo 7mo ago
    I agree with the sentiment, that most non-decisions are really implicit decisions in disguise. They have implications whether you thought about them up front or not. And if you need to revisit those non-decisions, it will cost you. But I don't like calling this tech debt. The tech debt concept is about taking on debt explicitly, as in choosing the sub-optimal path on purpose to meet a deadline then promising a "payment plan" to remove the debt in the future. Tech debt implies that you've actually done your homework but picked door number 2 instead. A very explicit choice, and one where decision makers must have skin in the game. A hurried, implicit choice has none of those characteristics - it's ignorance leading (inevitably?) to novel problems. That doesn't fit the debt metaphor at all. We need to distinguish tech debt from plain old sloppy decision making. Maybe management can even start taking responsibility for decisions instead of shrugging and saying "Tech debt, what can you do, amirite?"
• Adexintart 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • ohyoutravel 7mo ago
    Why make these slop bots? This account is 7 minutes old and has already posted paragraph-long AI-generated comments in several places.
• rco8786 7mo ago
  I think we're making a mistake by shoving all of this into the cloud rather than building tooling around local agents (worktrees, containers, as mentioned as "difficult" in the post). I think as an industry we just reach for cloud like our predecessors reached for IBM, without critical thought about what's actually the right tool for the job. If you can manage docker containers in a cloud, you can manage them on your local. Plus you get direct access to your own containers, local filesystems and persistence, locally running processes, quick access for making environmental tweaks or manual changes in tandem with your agents, etc. Not to mention the cost savings.
  • b40d-48b2-979e 7mo ago
    You also get all the risk of exposing your network and the cost of maintenance for your own datacenter.
  • cryptonector 7mo ago
    The thing is that startups often don't have the time or capital to build a data center even though public cloud is just more expensive. If you're bootstrapping a business then it makes sense. My advice would be to always use only those features of the public cloud that you can also use on your private cloud, such as Kubernetes.
    • rco8786 7mo ago
      I am confused. I am not saying anything about building a datacenter
    • martinald 7mo ago
      How do people think that's the only two options (AWS/cloud or build a datacenter)? It astounds me. There's _so_ many providers of 'bare metal' dedicated servers - Hetzner and OVH come up a lot, but _before_ AWS there was ev1servers (anyone remember them?).
      • andersmurphy 7mo ago
        Because, a lot of money went into cloud marketing to convince us those are the only two options. Tech is for all intents and purposes a planed economy (we are in the middle of the LLM five year plan comrade).
• mlrtime 7mo ago
  Pagerduty: They haven't yet hit that point where PD doubles the prices for them. Or they don't have everyone on the platform, it will be their next Datadog (too expensive)
  • jamiemallers 7mo ago
    PagerDuty's pricing trajectory is following the exact same playbook as Datadog. Start cheap enough that teams adopt it without finance approval, then jack up per-seat pricing once it's embedded in every runbook and escalation policy. The insidious part with on-call tooling specifically is that switching costs are higher than almost any other category. Your escalation chains, schedules, integrations with monitoring, incident templates, post-mortem workflows - it all becomes organizational muscle memory. Migrating monitoring backends is a weekend project compared to migrating on-call routing. What I've seen work: teams that treat on-call routing as a thin layer rather than a platform. If your schedules live in something portable (even a YAML file synced to whatever tool) and your alert routing is OpenTelemetry-native, swapping the actual dispatch tool becomes manageable. The teams that get locked in are the ones who build their entire incident process inside PD's UI.
    • yowlingcat 7mo ago
      Very clever. Our team is small enough right now for this to not be an issue, but I've ran into this issue previously and this feels like a far more practical design to avoid lockin.
    • mlrtime 7mo ago
      100% Anyone implementing PD paging into their company: I highly advise you add a template/interface on top of PD. This will make swapping out later much easier.
  • TechIsCool 7mo ago
    I agree, 2-3x pricing because you have more people always felt like a cash grab, similar to an SSO Tax. We also have a lot of complex Pagerduty configurations and their APIs are painful. Why do timestamps drift, templates get updated but don't show drift, and identifiers are not the same between UI and API. I regret implementing within Terraform and would rather just let teams manage their own on-call sadly.
• joshdick 7mo ago
  > everything owned by no one is owned by infrastructure eventually Whoa, now there is a truth bomb. I've seen this happen a bunch, but never put it this succinctly before.
• herpdyderp 7mo ago
  Does anyone have thoughts on how bunny.net compares to Netlify? I've been getting sick of them (and their pricing) recently...
• consumer451 7mo ago
  > Multiple applications sharing a database [0] > Regret Thanks for this data point. I am currently trying to make this call, and I was still on the fence. This has tipped me to the separate db side. Can anyone else share their experience with this decision? [0] https://cep.dev/posts/every-infrastructure-decision-i-endorse-or-regret-after-4-years-running-infrastructure-at-a-startup/#multiple-applications-sharing-a-database https://cep.dev/posts/every-infrastructure-decision-i-endors...
  • intrasight 7mo ago
    Accept that eventually you'll have multiple databases, so it makes sense to plan from that from the start and get in place the mechanisms for the databases to talk to each other.
    • dfee 7mo ago
      the method for databases to talk to each other is via? if we're not talking about replicas, we're talking about coordination at the app level, right?
      • intrasight 7mo ago
        Linked servers or FDWs
  • OJFord 7mo ago
    What's the DBMS? We moved in the other direction with postgres, merged multiple databases to simply have a schema per service/application instead. All the advantages with none of the disadvantages, imo. (We then had a single database per running test/dev environment, rather than multiple.) Of course, that's a pg thing, if you use MySQL for example it's not an option.
    • dfee 7mo ago
      i think this is aligned with the author's choice. a separate schema is effectively a separate database (from a product eng perspective) with shared infra.
• thundergolfer 7mo ago
  > There are no great FaaS options for running GPU workloads modal.com exists now
• dwedge 7mo ago
  This just feels like an article by someone who took an AWS course and promotes the company line
• arush15june 7mo ago
  I'll switch in Cloudflare Zero Trust for Okta simply for the fact that Cloudflare Access and Tunnels + An identity provider (we use M365) give you so much value (and it's free upto 50 users). It is even better if you are already running DNS on Cloudflare, you can securely deploy access-controlled apps on the internet without too much of a hassle and management. And with the recent addition for Infrastructure for SSH you can securely extend SSH access just as seamlessly.
• findalex 7mo ago
  My measurement of quality going in was how far I need to scroll to see EKS. Very high quality.
• bfeynman 7mo ago
  All in on AWS and using GitOps with TF instead of much more feature rich CDK...
• Hovertruck 7mo ago
  Much of this matches my own experience. A few thoughts: 1. Cost tracking meetings with your finance team are useful, but for AWS and other services that support it I highly recommend setting billing alarms. The sooner you can know about runaway costs, the sooner you can do something about it. 2. Highly recommend PGAnalyze (https://pganalyze.com/ https://pganalyze.com/) if you're running Postgres in your stack. It's really intuitive, and has proven itself invaluable many times when debugging issues. 3. Having used Notion for like 7 years now, I don't think I love it as much as I used to. I feel like the "complexity" of documents gets inflated by Notion and the number of tools it gives you, and the experience of just writing text in Notion isn't super smooth IMO. 4. +1 to moving off JIRA. We moved to Shortcut years ago, I know Linear is the new hotness now. 5. I would put Datadog as an "endorse". It's certainly expensive but I feel we get loads of value out of it since we leaned so heavily into it as a central platform.
  • bwilliams18 7mo ago
    There's a big difference between runaway costs and these costs over here, which are 10-20% higher than we think makes sense, especially compared to what we're spending over here. Let's spend some time figuring out how to reduce those costs. You should be doing both - belt and suspenders.
• stego-tech 7mo ago
  Love it. Excellent reasoning for subjective decisions that don’t knock the product or solution itself as much as, “not what we specifically needed, and that’s okay”. Bookmarked for my own infrastructure transformations. Honestly, if Okta could spit out a container or appliance that replaces on-prem ADDCs for LDAP, GPOs, and Kerberos, I’d give them all the money. They’re just so good.
• shockwaverider 7mo ago
  I’m CTO for a startup that was recently acquired for $100M+ I agree with everything in this post apart from Go because I’m just not a big fan of the language.
• esoterae 7mo ago
  Honestly, this is a reasonable itemization of experience with individual tools, but this reads like a recipe for Company Cake instead of a case-by-case statement of need, selection, and then evaluation. Cargo culting continues to wrap its tendrils around the industry and try to drag it into the depths of mediocrity, and this largely reads to me like a primer for how to saddle yourself with endless SaaS bills. I recognize that every situation has its nuances, but I think approaching running a company from "what tools do you use" is pretty much the biggest possible example of ignoring that maxim.
• rewilder12 7mo ago
  lol the ingress-nginx endorsement aged well
• mads_quist 7mo ago
  Jesus, this piece reads like it's from 2024. Oh, it's from 2024.
• artyom 7mo ago
  > Multiple applications sharing a database This is a classic. I'd say that for every company, big or small, ends up taking the #1 spot on technical debt.
  • allanbreyes 7mo ago
    Martin Fowler called this (anti-)pattern an "integration database" and discouraged it since at least 2004[1] [1]: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/IntegrationDatabase.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/IntegrationDatabase.html
• indiestack 7mo ago
  The SQLite-per-customer pattern mentioned in the database subthread is underrated. I've been running a FastAPI app with a single SQLite database (WAL mode + FTS5) and the operational simplicity is genuinely life-changing compared to managing Postgres. The key insight: for read-heavy workloads on a single machine, SQLite eliminates the network hop entirely. Response times drop to sub-15ms for full-text search queries. The tradeoff is write concurrency, but if your write volume is low (mine is ~20/day), it's a non-issue. The one thing I'd add to the article: the biggest infrastructure regret I see is premature complexity. Running Postgres + Redis + a message queue when your app gets 100 requests/day is solving problems you don't have while creating problems you do (operational overhead, debugging distributed state, config drift between environments).
• ungreased0675 7mo ago
  Is it common practice for a startup to have ALL of those SaaS subscriptions? It seems excessive and expensive. Is this what most startups are doing these days?