Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure Rails and Java are the culprits. Rails deployment is actually not that difficult once you get a few things figured out.

Perhaps the problem is a generation that has grown up without looking under the hood as much, preferring the flashy "just works" Mac, for instance, to running Linux as a desktop OS and knowing something about how to administrate it it. That's a skill that may not allow you to be an admin for a big site, but should be enough to help you get a server up and running, and maintain it.

Also - and this is a positive development - as of late there has been more focus on making sure you've got something the market wants before you worry about scaling and another problems like that.

Still though, I think that it's not that hard to get a basic server up and running, and deploy to something you manage yourself. Amongst other things, it gives you way more flexibility than what something like Heroku can offer. Want to recompile Postgres yourself, with some funky option enabled? Not a problem!

David what you say is absolutely possible, that is, the reason could be more of a cultural / focus shift, but when I think to invest my money on a startup where the core guys can't, if they want, setup a server and run their operations if needed or fix a bug overnight understanding what's wrong in a server, I feel there is something wrong.

About the focus on making sure you build something the market wants, it is a good approach, but on the other side maybe the focus is just on that, and there is little interest about the ability to create a sustainable service where the only exit is not being acquired. A big part of being sustainable, especially with the freemium model, is cheap operations. It's a key value of being able to say to your users once you start to get some traction, ok, give me 5$ per month, and I'll be profitable.

From that point of view startups spending like 2000$ / month while not even remotely profitable while it is possible perhaps with more wise coding and in-house ops to spend 200$ seems very odd to me, and not a trend I want to see encouraged, so I posted my original message in order to provide, maybe with some provocation intent, a different point of view.

Just think for a moment if there are no longer big companies acquiring you (that is now the norm but it was not in the past) how the operations and costs point of view changes.

Unless you selected a platform that is too complex to start with. I think that many of the PaaS companies I see today are here mainly for two reasons: Rails & Java frameworks.

Can't speak for Heroku but with EC2 you get the ability to dynamically add/remove instances. While this seems like it's needed only for certain kinds of startups, the reality is that most background processing is batch oriented and it's extremely cost effective to just spin up instances when I need them, crunch the data and terminate them after that. And, if you go for spot instances (and use a fault tolerant framework like Hadoop to distribute jobs), it's becomes even more cheaper.

I think EC2 is not quite "PaaS":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service

Since you still do need to administrate the instances you run.

> Unless you selected a platform that is too complex to start with. I think that many of the PaaS companies I see today are here mainly for two reasons: Rails & Java frameworks.

I think this is where I misunderstood you originally. For 3 days, Hacker News has been discussing the performance of -Rails- on Heroku. If I had understood at the beginning that your real argument is to use Sinatra/PHP/NodeJS/whatever (you're somewhat vague on recommended alternatives), I would not have jumped in. I do not have enough experience hosting other tech stacks at scale to be advising on the viability of open source solutions.

As for your other 3 points, presuming a Rails stack: all of those smell like a premature optimization for any company with less than 500K customers. If I went to my clients and said "Hey, we should invest 1-2 days in spooling up a server, because if we gain traction 6 months from now, we'll have to pay Heroku a lot of money until we fix it!", they would grin a bit and say:

"That would be a great problem to have. Now go back to shipping features so we gain traction and actually have to worry about fantastic problems like how to deal with having too many users."

Yes, features are important, and you don't want to waste your time doing stuff you can easily outsource. However, I think it's not about saving $2000 by outsourcing, it's really about understanding how your software runs. How each request is handled. How each layer and architecture affects scalability, performance and stability.

One of the things we've seen in this Rails/Heroku example is that the platform can't really be completely transparent. If you treat it as some obscure service and don't understand how it fits together - you lose. You can't optimize, you can't scale, you can't give consistent experience to your users.

I personally don't particularly like the distinction between devops and developers. I think all developers should have a good grasp of the platform. Of how pieces fit together. This is a worthwhile investment, not to save money on your PaaS, but to build a good solid app with good architecture. Performance, scalability and security are also features you should be shipping.