[latchkey]

Not if you do it right.

a) you get to fire the devops person, which saves $150k+ a year.

b) you add appropriate caching layers in front of everything.

c) you spend time adding features, which generate revenue.

I've done all of this before at scale. This whole case study was written about work I did [1]. Two devs, 3 months to release, first year was $80m gross revenue on $500/month cloud bills. Infinite scalability, zero devops.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/customers/gearlaunch

[Nextgrid]

> you get to fire the devops person, which saves $150k+ a year.

You are deluded or extremely short-sighted if you believe you can actually fire the devops guy. From my experience, the more you stray away from the conventional "dedicated server" paradigm the more you need a devops guy and you are in a very precarious position if you do fire him and something goes wrong.

[latchkey]

You don't hire the devops person until you've scaled to the point that you need one.

Additionally, your thought of having my company held hostage by a single devops person is terrifying. Now you need two of them, which is even more expensive.

It is a great way to bootstrap a company by saving on a salary (or two) that can honestly be engineered out for a lot of SASS businesses. It worked super well for us... and calling someone who did $80m in the first year deluded seems well, rude.

But, if you start off designing systems that scale on their own, you are much better prepared for when you do get some fast growth than dealing with hiring a good devops person (which is extremely hard, as they say.. all the good ones are taken).

At the end of the day, the actual elephant in the room is that django was the wrong choice. You end up having to go through a lot of contortions to make things work, as evidenced by the blog post. The architecture doesn't make things easy to spin up quickly... which creates a lot of bottlenecks. There are better cloud-based solutions.

[quickthrower2]

If you don’t have a devops person, then you end up with developers pitching in to fill that void. That’s OK and may be desirable but it is still a cost.