[beweinreich]

As someone who recently drove down the path of learning all the new "hotness" in the DevOps world, I can safely say I came out of it with two learnings:

1. I have a much better understanding of what's happening behind-the-scenes

2. For most small startups, you should seriously consider the time (and therefore, cost) of investing in your own infrastructure.

For point #1, I think understanding your options and how they benefit your company is essential for you transition from a small -> medium -> large size company. The paradigms you learn by virtue of researching the new technologies might end up being applicable in other parts of your development process.

On point #2, I partially regret not deploying to Heroku, seeing where our system became stressed, and optimizing. Attempting to scale for things you don't know about yet is tough, and can lead you down a path of wasted time and money.