Infrastructure Decisions At A Startup

I came across this amazing post, (Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup

The author, Jack Lindamood, outlines his experience running infrastructure in a unique format, and his experience aligns almost exactly with mine at my current company two years in.

Given that, I’m going to highlight certain bullet points:

• AWS VPN: He mentions CloudFlare’s Zero Trust product as something they stayed away from. I haven’t had good experiences with AWS VPN, but I’ve also had terrible experiences with CloudFlare’s Zero Trust. Their documentation is bad, and hard to search, and I can’t get our GitHub Actions Runners to connect to the VPN consistently. My recommendation is to use Tailscale if you need a VPN.
• AWS Premium Support: Yes, it’s expensive, but it’s invaluable for us to have support look into certain production issues, such as RDS issues, that we don’t have a DBA for.
• Multiple applications sharing a database: If you’re starting and have a choice, bite the bullet and have different database instances for each service.
• Not using open telemetry early: I mentioned this in an earlier post. Highly agree.
• Picking Flux for k8s GitOps: ArgoCD was mentioned as a viable alternative that I’m using. WeaveWorks, the company that created Flux has now shut down, which makes ArgoCD the choice today.

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