[layoric]

Distracting is right! I watched your CrystalConf video and was happy to see the familiar Postgres + Redis combo :). I remember worrying about running out of legs with Redis (being single threaded), but with a combo of pipelining and changing the data structures used it ended up being the piece of infra that had the most headroom.

Monitoring was probably the biggest value for outsourcing to another SaaS. I used Runscope, AWS dashboards and own elasticsearch and it was pretty cost effective for the API that was doing ~2M API calls a day.

The other risk of cloud solutions is the crazy cost spikes. I remember consulting a partner, much larger, weather company on reducing their costs of a similar global weather product where they chose AWS DynamoDB as their main datastore, and their bill just for DynamoDB was twice our companies cloud bill. All because it was slightly "easier" to not think about compute requirements!

Any ways, thanks for the postmortem, hopefully your channeling of quiet wisdom continues to branch out to others! :)