It's laughable to think every small company has infra/DevOps/platform teams.
Also, in general, it's very useful to know the platform your software is going to be deployed to, so that you can design the software with those constraints in mind.
Also, in general, it's very useful to know the platform your software is going to be deployed to, so that you can design the software with those constraints in mind.
After you have the money for devops, sure, seems great, many benefits. Or if you are just doing it for fun and want to learn, also fine. Or if you have some requirement (health data or something) then great.
But that 20~ has to be the lowest leverage thing possible to spend that time and money on if you are just a regular SaaS, marketplace, <name your startup type> start up. I am genuinely interested how I would get a better return on that rather than fixing bugs, listening to customers, building features, etc.
The only thing I ever hear is "In 5 years you might be locked in and you will regret it." When, in reality, if most startups lasted 5 years, they would be ecstatic...
You can have your developers manually copy paste files to a server, which is great while it works, but it's far better to have an automated process. At that point it's not really much more work, in fact I'd argue it's less, to pick docker + kubernetes than any of the alternatives.
Used to work somewhere that just used some VPSes instead of managed hosting. That 20% time was spent on debugging OS issues, disk space issues, OS package updates, downtime needed to increase instance sizing, documenting (read: not actually documenting just leaving it up to the next person) how to rebuild the environment etc etc.