Managed Infrastructure

The main job to be done by a startup engineer is to build things that help the team get to signs of product market fit. PMF is not a destination, you keep strengthening the current and growing into bigger/better for a large part of the first few year. Revenue matters more than margins. Cloud providers were initially built for infrastruture/platform engineers and not application engineers so even though they provide many managed services, their identity/access management, security model and developer experience are morphed to support application engineers and not native to them. Enough independent managed infrastruture and dev tooling has matured in the last five years for developers to focus on the main job to be done. Compliance and certification are generally achievable with these platforms almost as easily as when running apps on your own cloud.

For all early teams I work with, I prefer services like Vercel, Render, Neon, Clerk, Trigger and more. We can be entitled about our infrastructure and OSS values when we have done the main job to be done ie found a massive market and won it. This last bit is very relevant to all DHH fanbois who are spinning up linux boxes at Hertzner, but hey, you do you. All I am saying is that, if you don’t have some compelling reason (as seen in defence-tech), it makes little sense to worry about scaling complex infra and doing devops when you don’t have $XX million in revenue.