How to save 1M off your cloud infra? Start from a 2M bill.
That's how I see most of these projects. You create a massively expensive infra because webscale, then 3 years down the road you (or someone else) gets to rebuild it 10x cheaper. You get to write two blog posts, one for using $tech and one for migrating off $tech. A line in the cv and a promotion.
But kudos for them for managing to stop the snowball and actually reverting course. Most places wouldn't dare because of sunken costs.
I don't think that's necessarily a problem. When starting a new product time to market as well as identifying the user needs feature wise is way more important than being able to scale "Infinitely".
It makes sense to use whatever $tech helps you get an MVP out asap and iterate on it. once you're sure you found gold, then it makes sense to optimize for scale. The only thing I guess one has to worry about when developing something like that, is to make sure good scalability is possible with some tinkering and efforts and not totally impossible.
I agree with you. I'm not advocating for hyper cost optimization at an early stage startup. You probably don't need k8s to get your mvp out of the door either.
The article says they spend around $150k/year on infra. Given they have 8 DevOps engineers I assume a team of 50+ engineers. Assuming $100k/engineer that's $5 million/year in salary. That's all low end estimates.
They saved $100k in the move or 2% of their engineering costs. And they're still very much on the cloud.
If you tell most organizations that they need to change everything to save 2% they'll tell you to go away. This place benefited because their previous system was badly designed and not because it's cloud.
I'm not making an argument against the cloud here. Not saying you should move out. The reason why I call out cloud infrastructure specifically is because of how easy it is to let the costs get away from you in the cloud. This is a common thread in every company that uses the cloud. There is a huge amount of waste. And this company's story isn't different.
By the way, 8 DevOps engineers with $150k/year cloud bill deserves to be highlighted here. This is a very high amount of staff dedicated to a relatively small infrastructure setup in an industry that keeps saying "cloud will manage that for you."
To expand on this, I run BareMetalSavings.com[0] and the most common cause of people staying with the cloud is it's very hard for them to maintain their own K8S cluster(s), which they want to keep because they're great for any non-ops developer.
So those savings are possible only if your devs are willing to leave the lock in of comfort
Cloud isn't about comfort lock in but dev efficiency.