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Comment by hw | Hacker News Reader

> AWS gives you all the things you'd need to scale, without heavy up-front costs

A startup doesn't need AWS right off the bat. Planning for scale right from the beginning is a way to quickly bleed $. Of course, if you have VC money, why not spend that cash right?

Where I work we've started non-AWS and have continued non-AWS. We don't have a team of devops engineers, but rather a team where there are a engineers who _can_ do devops. I dread the day we need to move to AWS, but it's much easier moving to AWS than off it.

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Yeah but that's what capex based stuff (like buying and colocating) is: planning for scale. With AWS you think you need a robust DB and shit and you've made a decision that can be undone in minutes.

You think you want Elasticache? It's a fifteen minute operation. In that time your devops guy isn't going to have even downloaded the binary and figured out the docs.

As I wrote further up, there's not just colocation and AWS. Dedicated servers are a great fit for many start ups and need no capex. You just rent hardware monthly like you lease most of your office equipment. Much cheaper than AWS, no hardware expertise needed and even (manual) scaling over time works quite well, it's easy to add servers within a day or so.

Sure, you'll always have idle capacity, but this way you could use it. With AWS, Amazon runs that idle capacity and charges you for it.

> With AWS you think you need a robust DB and shit and you've made a decision that can be undone in minutes.

If it can be undone in minutes, it isn't much of a decision. A service that can be enabled or canceled on a whim is unnecessary.

Realistically, analyzing the guarantees offered by a cloud platform, your corresponding requirements, and how everything is supposed to work is going to take days, and actually developing and testing disaster recovery procedures is going to take even longer.

You don't necessarily need to plan from scale from the start. Often you just need a few servers, a load balancer, a database, some file storage, internal networking, user permissions, and some level of security/firewall. That is very easy to set up on AWS in a day or two, and you don't need all your engineers to simultaneously be devops experts.

The scale can happen once you've validated your startup, and when that happens it's a lot easier to just turn on 30 more EC2 instances than to get on the phone with Dell.

You probably don't get on the phone with Dell. There's a large area in between EC2 and racking your own boxes in your own datacenter. You can buy dedicated machines from OVH or similar firms with lead time of a few days, and it's a very rare firm that can't predict their load a week in advance .. even for a fast growing company.

Look at it like this; GitHub mostly ran in their own datacenter using AWS only for spillover capacity. They scaled just fine. Virtually no apps have the problem of runaway growth that they can't handle without instantly provisioned resources.

There are some merits to AWS, I can agree with that, and there comes a point where a startup outgrows baremetal / cookie cutter VPS-es, but I disagree with "AWS is trivial" and that it takes a day or two to get things set up. For basic set up like getting a few servers done behind a load balancer and a database - sure - and I'd argue that services like DigitalOcean and Linode are actually easier to set up than AWS for basic services.

To actually do more advanced stuff (the thing that AWS is good for) and utilize tools such as Terraform, you'd essentially need to hire engineers that are experts in AWS in addition to engineers who can do devops, as there's only so much "magic" AWS can provide.

> A startup doesn't need AWS right off the bat. Planning for scale right from the beginning is a way to quickly bleed $. Of course, if you have VC money, why not spend that cash right?

Especially when the alternative is to hear a lot of, "What? You don't expect to scale? I thought you took this seriously."

OVH and Hetzner could probably provide you with at least 100 top of the line servers within 24h (just guessed that, it's probably more). With a reasonable setup, that's much more than any start up will need to scale.

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