[ljm]

I’ve been exploring this lately because, honestly, the cloud is total overkill for small startups and hobby projects.

Kubernetes has its value even for small scale workloads like that, but it’s still a few steps more than, say, running a Capistrano script to push your code to a small Linux box with a database on a second one.

You’ll get really far on minimal resources these days, especially with cheaper ARM boxes that offer far more bang for your buck. Paying 1k+ a month to AWS/GCP/Azure is total insanity when you’re not even averaging a single active user a day.

[clvx]

At the beginning, just for the development experience I would just put an instance in some cloud provider and use microk8s or k3s to serve the app. It's very straightforward and then you can move to a managed service if needed. You will probably be using the same tooling and integrations at different steps. Context switching is low and you can reproduce locally. I'm down for serverless options when needed but I have a strong preference for local development.

[CharlesW]

> …the cloud is total overkill for small startups and hobby projects.

It absolutely can be, sure. But solutions like Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Supabase, etc. can be excellent and inexpensive for those use cases.

[meinheld111]

And surely a vivid tech stack does more to make you look good in front of vc‘s than an overkill architecture does make you look incompetent

[djbusby]

IME the investor cares more about Traction that Technology.

[mejutoco]

IDK, I remember seeing a tweet from Paul Graham saying that any new startup should use Typescript (I guess instead of js) so there might be some rules of thumb that some investors follow.

[ljm]

I consider them separate from the cloud on the basis they’re offering a platform as a service that just happens to re-sell cloud resources.

If you tried to replicate them on the same cloud provider, end to end, it would cost far more than they charge.

[mvdtnz]

Vercel is a lot of things but I don't think I've ever seen it referred to as "inexpensive".

[CharlesW]

So far, for my hobby projects it's basically free.

[mikeravkine]

This is exactly how the serverless guys "get you": Low traffic is nearly free but you pay for it on the slope of the scale cost ramp.

[CharlesW]

Sure, but aren't all cloud services notoriously expensive as you scale? At some point I assume you'd do what companies like Dropbox and Basecamp did, and re-host some or all of it.

[candiodari]

Well, yeah, but now it starts being totally ridiculous.

For small projects the cloud is not needed, and a lot of effort that won't pay off. The only case where it'll pay off is if you "go viral" and rapidly need to increase capacity.

This is not free. While the cloud helps with scaling, your application still needs to support it. So there's a development cost to it, even when starting.

Then, if you scale, the cost makes it almost a necessity to rapidly get back off of the cloud ...

[TheNewsIsHere]

It’s not the first time I’ve written about this. The hyperscalers are pretty much the most expensive way to build a business that isn’t presently hyperscale, and their ecosystems are increasingly optimized for sprawling stacks built on a virtually unlimited number of microservices.

That’s just not a realistic or necessary approach for everyone.

AWS is engineered for excruciatingly detailed billing right down to the moment you’re consuming or releasing capacity, and that’s how they built it. Managing that spend is exhausting.

My business runs on under $200/mo in Linode compute resources and the performance is significantly better than on similarly situated EC2 instances. We were spending that on databases alone with AWS and getting a fraction of the performance.

I make extensive use of “pure” Linode Kubernetes Engine k8s. It’s portable to any other Kubernetes cluster, and it lets me take my stack _anywhere_, even to a rack in the nearest data center willing to rent me space, if I really wanted.