<story><title>You Don&apos;t Need the Cloud</title><url>https://80daystartup.com/day-10/you-dont-need-the-cloud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>Actually, rapidly developing a startup (as is the context of this website) is one of the best use cases of cloud services.&lt;p&gt;It’s true: You can set up and maintain all of your own services, create a backup system for them, test it all, and handle your own redundancy. If you have an engineering background, this probably feels natural and will feel like a lot of progress and accomplishment. But in the time it takes to do all of that (usually distributed and interwoven into other activities) you could have been prototyping out your startup. That’s the value of cloud.&lt;p&gt;You can always invest the effort into setting up your own services later as a cost reduction move. Doing the cost-reduction activities before you’ve even prototyped a business isn’t a great use of precious time in a startup’s early days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>samhw</author><text>This is why I think we need a &amp;#x27;simple cloud&amp;#x27; where people can spin up a single server nearly instantly, with sane defaults which are configurable if needed, and a super simple flow to connect it to GitHub (maybe even &amp;quot;Go to your repo and `curl foo.sh&amp;#x2F;setup?id=ZnVjayB0ZXJyYWZvcm0K | sh`, then commit the result&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;so much&lt;/i&gt; you could do from a UX point of view. Nobody wants to be fiddling around with IAM roles, trying to add the right ingress rules so their server can actually connect to the internet, configuring TCP_NODELAY, etc - and then constantly wondering if their server is secure. Just to run some CRUD React app whose requirements are the same as the other 99.99% of developers.</text></comment>
<story><title>You Don&apos;t Need the Cloud</title><url>https://80daystartup.com/day-10/you-dont-need-the-cloud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>Actually, rapidly developing a startup (as is the context of this website) is one of the best use cases of cloud services.&lt;p&gt;It’s true: You can set up and maintain all of your own services, create a backup system for them, test it all, and handle your own redundancy. If you have an engineering background, this probably feels natural and will feel like a lot of progress and accomplishment. But in the time it takes to do all of that (usually distributed and interwoven into other activities) you could have been prototyping out your startup. That’s the value of cloud.&lt;p&gt;You can always invest the effort into setting up your own services later as a cost reduction move. Doing the cost-reduction activities before you’ve even prototyped a business isn’t a great use of precious time in a startup’s early days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdvh</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s fair, and I&amp;#x27;m not dogmatically opposed to the cloud. But when you have underpowered cloud machines you end up having different machines for email, for web workers, for caching, and so on. The complexity you introduce by making your app scalable in that way you just don&amp;#x27;t have when you stick everything on 1 dedicated server. With dedicated machines I don&amp;#x27;t need to create a distributed architecture prematurely.&lt;p&gt;It takes us some time to set up dedicated machines, but less than a day. Ansible helps a bunch.</text></comment>