Start by building a business that isn't differentiated by how many 9s you have. Something customers want so badly that a few hours of inconvenient downtime doesn't move the needle at all.
In this situation, blowing up your system complexity to maybe get another 9 makes no sense. Then the revenue change is pretty irrelevant for modest downtime.
People under estimate single server uptime. If availability is really that important, buy a hot backup. Put it in another region. Done.
I do something similar with stripe. I add two items to the subscription. A base unit that charges a fixed price up front and monthly thereafter. And usage based second item that bills based on usage minus the pre charged items. Usage based fires for the first time on their second charge.
If the user cancels their subscription, I run it through the next payment period for their usage based billing period and then cancel it.
I do something similar with stripe. I add two items to the subscription. A base unit that charges a fixed price up front and monthly thereafter. And usage based second item that bills based on usage minus the pre charged items.
New billing primitives. Cost per invocation on functions and edge requests where it used to included in GB/h and bandwidth.
Cost per cache read and write instead of lumping it all in the bandwidth bill.
My reading is that the criticism of the bandwidth egress fees and it's inevitable unfavorable comparisons has hit home.
Only they were using that bucket for more than just egress. So they are breaking charges apart and this is going to have winners and losers from their customer base.
Reminds me of cloudflare pricing. They don't charge you bandwidth but do charge for invocations and if you do the math on how they bill invocations, the egress is in there - you are not escaping it. But the press of no egress fees is nice.
> 2. The founder doesn’t understand that the value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea.
The best startups have both.
You can execute, great. But if you have poor industry understanding and no idea what is going to work in that space. Let alone something that is going to revolutionize the space. It is, similarly, not going to work.
Your industry expert need to have 20-30 years in the space. Understand it from the ground up. That guy is actually valuable.
It's not one idea, it's comprehensive understanding of all the current struggles in the space.
Recently watched a relatively young person parley a position at a small company with a VP title that resulted in a slot at a regionally well known organization as a director and then president of a much larger startup.
Over about 4 years he went from front line sales to running a sizeable company with the key step being the VP title at the small company that rocketed him up.
I also recall a former co-worker that was denied promotion and generally failing to progress in his career. He took a slot at a tiny company explicitly for the title. I think it was director. He managed to parlay that into very positive career moves.
Personally, I don't care as much about titles these days. I just don't want to work for places making terrible tech decisions and forcing me to work within that. I'm happiest making the decisions and really don't want to stop, whatever it's called.
> it's not like you're going to realize equivalent margins by running your own little server
I get even better than their margins. In the neighborhood of 100x cheaper. It's not rocket science.
> equivalent availability
AWS availability isn't all that super great. Most of their services are rated for only 99.95 before they offer pittance credits. That's not difficult to meet with a single computer...
> scalability
A service only needs good enough scalability. Auto scaling is also a bug, not just a feature. Remember that it is also tied to auto billing. I can't afford to have my wallet DDOSed.
> security
Security is always a problem that needs to be solved. You don't get an auto pass on security needs because you signed up for AWS.
> support
You have to pay for that.... You can get it from other vendors too if you have budget for it.
> ecosystem
This is flat out wrong. Compare AWS offerings to the breadth and depth of open source offerings and the latter comes out far ahead.
The cheap instances are ipv6 only and only a couple of their regions have them. Atlanta, I think, does. But yeah, it's a teaser that isn't realistic. At least for me.
> nobody measures such metrics: size, bloat, speed...
Have you ever looked at the bloat of linkedin web? I've had tabs over 1GB memory use. Most bloated site I've ever used with any kind of regularity.
> Not related to Libkedin, but what is the carbon footprint of all electron-based apps that take hundreds of megabytes and gigantic amount of processor time?
I make an election app. It uses 70-80 mb of RAM when running. It's not that bad when you don't blow out your dependencies and code structure.
Apparently I don't understand. If the code isn't poor, why throw it away for a new even more complex system? I don't know how code isn't poor, yet is indecipherable.
Regardless, the method works even in a complex environment.
Sometimes API calls make 5-10 queries to the database. So it's 600ms to setup TLS and make a call at the origin server and the number of db calls is irrelevant.
Or a quick TLS connection to the edge and 1000-2000ms to fulfill because of db distance.
Maybe you can do some of the calls in parallel, but sometimes not. Session lookup plus another query after permissions are established and your edge latency savings are almost entirely gone.
Follow-up API calls will always be worse because TLS is a one time issue and db distance will continuously bite you call after call after call.
Then there's a cold start where the edge function has to link up with the database and do it's own TLS or equivalent.
Edge functions have a lot of issues you have to worry about that increase system complexity to solve.
You could solve this other ways. Build a new better monolith and have a reverse proxy route between them and slowly update and move routes over. You will get through a rewrite slowly one bit at a time.
If you keep the same database schema this should generally work pretty well.
I migrated a terribly written web app this way, it worked pretty well.
This hasn't been my experience. Replace sysadmin with cloud engineer/architect, salary bump, no reduction in quantity. This assumes you are mildly competent as an organization.
On managed services, say the database. My experience is that the extra costs of the service are larger (usually much much larger) than any salaries or head count reduction. I'd rather employ more people than not, and actually control my data, given the choice. Particularly when the savings are questionable or false.
I generally prefer a lower dependency count. Code and vendor. Even at modest immediate cost increases, you gain better flexibility and there are less things to bite you.
> Reduced costs in off peak hours with on-demand instances.
Agreed. You do increase system complexity to accomplish it. But there are actual cost savings here.
> Right sizing resources to application needs.
This isn't unique to cloud, you can do this in any hypervisor. This is a basic feature.
> There are wins that one can have, but nothing is guaranteed
It does not "always" hold. This is critical missing nuance in the original claim.
In this situation, blowing up your system complexity to maybe get another 9 makes no sense. Then the revenue change is pretty irrelevant for modest downtime.
People under estimate single server uptime. If availability is really that important, buy a hot backup. Put it in another region. Done.