[brycelarkin]

Awesome writeup! Just had a couple comments/questions.

> Not adopting an identity platform early on

The reason for not adopting an IDP early is because almost every vendor price gouges for SAML SSO integration. Would you say it's worth the cost even when you're a 3-5 person startup?

> Datadog

What would you recommend as an alternative? Cloudwatch? I love everything about Datadog, except for their pricing....

> Nginx load balancer for EKS ingress

Any reason for doing this instead of an Application Load Balancer? Or even HA Proxy?

[kevinslin]

For datadog, unfortunately there's no obvious altnernative despite many companies trying to take marketshare. This is to say, datadog both has second to none DX and a wide breadth of services.

Grafana Labs comes closest in terms of breadth but their DX is abysmal (I say this as a heavy grafana/prometheus user) Same comments about new relic though they have better dx than grafana. Chronosphere has some nice DX around prometheus based metrics but lack the full product suite. I could go on but essentially, all vendors either lack breadth, DX, or both.