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> What does this have to do with startups though? Well, high performance means fewer servers, fewer servers means less operational overhead. As a startup your runway burns up pretty fast if you start spending it on web servers that can only support a few hundred requests per second each. This is the most interesting part for me. Not the specific numbers, but the general notion of "performance actually matters". There's impact on ROI, UX, complexity and sometimes it lets you do things that you wouldn't otherwise consider. There was a post fairly recently on here, where they showed a deployment architecture of a small business or startup. It was a simple thing, with a couple of app servers, databases and load balancers. Something like that. The app servers were written in Python/Django I think. The essence was that "this is a simple architecture on relatively cheap VPS instances with minimal complexity and it handles a ton of traffic", I think the bill was a couple hundred or a month maybe 1/2k max. I liked it. But even then I thought that there has to be some overhead that can be cut there. If your app server plus database performs well _enough_ you can run them on just one instance, you can cut several load balancers. All you need is a backup machine if you care about downtime, especially during deployments. That would roughly cost you maybe 5x less. Then you might actually be able to cut down the performance of the machine, another factor of 2. Now your bills are 10x less, you have fewer things to worry about, possibly less complex tools needed. So let's say a single developer can save them 1k (EUR/$) monthly, that would be 5-10h work hours gross, or just say a day of billable work, every month that they get out of it. And this is not considering the gains from reducing the complexity and setting themselves up for finer grained improvements and other benefits that were not possible before. I'm not considering the downsides and the estimates are shaky at best. But there might be something to this, even for fairly small teams and companies. |
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/sustainability-with-...