I disagree with the parent that the cloud is a scam. But I also disagree that getting to market faster is opposed to the operational simplicity that he's talking about.
Startups are very likely to fail before they need to scale. So that single-threaded C++ server, or whatever it is that the existing engineers are fastest at creating, is fine to get out there and get early market feedback.
The way I always balance this is to make the product manager put scaling and redundancy stories in the queue with feature stories. We'll build with scaling and redundancy in mind, but we don't do any extra work until the business decides those things are a higher priority than testing new hypotheses. And then I have them buy it in increments, so we can add automated load tests as we go. Then if we were to get into failwhale territory, it'd be a decision we all made together.
Startups are very likely to fail before they need to scale. So that single-threaded C++ server, or whatever it is that the existing engineers are fastest at creating, is fine to get out there and get early market feedback.
The way I always balance this is to make the product manager put scaling and redundancy stories in the queue with feature stories. We'll build with scaling and redundancy in mind, but we don't do any extra work until the business decides those things are a higher priority than testing new hypotheses. And then I have them buy it in increments, so we can add automated load tests as we go. Then if we were to get into failwhale territory, it'd be a decision we all made together.