[endisneigh]

The title and FTA are true but the economics for a startup is tricky.

One of the spectrum is true bare metal - setting up a data center, space, power, cooling and all of that.

Next step might be colocation.

The other end of the spectrum might be something like Firebase or DynamoDB. A step to the left from there might be Cloud Run, and then GKE.

It’s difficult to know how to spend your time and money as a function of the associated costs and maintenance.

Unfortunately from what I’ve seen the big clouds are a bit too expensive compared to the likes of Hetzner et al to just overprovision and forget about it.

I will say that it’s getting easier to have a self hosted set up that supports failover well with CockroachDB, TiDB and such.

The app side still needs refinement. Maintaining a k8s cluster on bare metal isn’t trivial.