(Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup
I'm almost at the 4 year mark at Tend, which also means the main technical stack is around the 4 year mark. A lot of the same things are on my mind - did we (and sometimes, I) make the right decision around some key things, or could we have done better? If they were not right - is it something we can/should roll back?
Unlike Jack, I've not spent 4 years "running infrastructure", tho it was my main focus for a lot of the first 18 months. And not all the decisions were mine - we started with 4 engineers, and a lot of the decisions were group ones, tho with some pretty heavy biases - with good reasons.
I'm not sure we actually had any other choice. Google was a non-starter (hello killedbygoogle.com), Azure might have worked but... We had a very good relationship with AWS at the previous job (of which our CPTO was the VPEng), and its what I knew well. Likely we should have put more stuff in Sydney, not Oregon (can't engineer around physics!), but once the NZ region is bedded in, we'll likely move here, at least for customer-facing stuff. 150ms RTT across the pacific for every call is a bit of a killer.
Serverless v1 came out about when we started. It was easy to setup and use from Lambda - especially with DataAPI, and, well, it just worked.
