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In early startup stages, you\u2019re developing the product, testing market fit, and refining your go-to-market strategy. Long-term infrastructure decisions may not even be on your radar, but if you want to scale beyond Series B, it pays to be planful before you\u2019re locked in with a cloud services provider and storage costs are holding you back.<\/p>\n
How will you manage your data? How much storage will you need to meet demand? Will your current provider continue to serve your use case? In this post, we\u2019ll talk about how infrastructure decisions come into play in early startup development, the advantages of multi-cloud infrastructure, and best practices for implementing a multi-cloud system.<\/p>\n
Infrastructure planning becomes critical at three key points in early startup development:<\/p>\n
Utilizing free cloud credits through a startup incubator like AWS Activate or the Google Cloud Startup Program at this stage of the game makes sense\u2014you can build a minimum viable product without burning through outside investment. But you can\u2019t rely on free credits forever<\/a>. As you discover your market fit, you need to look for ways of sustaining growth and ensuring operating costs don\u2019t get out of control later. You have three options:<\/p>\n Any of these options can work. What you choose is less important than the exercise of making a thoughtful choice and planning as though you\u2019re going to be successful rather than relying on free credits and hoping for the best.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s say you decide to take full advantage of free credits, and the best possible outcome happens\u2014your product takes off like wildfire. That\u2019s great, right? Yes, until you realize you\u2019re burning through your credits faster than expected and you have to scramble to figure out if your infrastructure can handle the demand while<\/em> simultaneously optimizing spend. Especially for startups with a heavy data component like media, games, and analytics, increased traffic can be especially problematic\u2014storage racks up, but more often, it\u2019s egress fees that are the killer when data is being accessed frequently.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not hard to find evidence of the damage that can occur when you don\u2019t keep an eye on these costs:<\/p>\n That’s right–it’s threading time!@chrisshort<\/a>‘s surprise @awscloud<\/a> bill of $2700 looks S3 driven… https:\/\/t.co\/VnXufn24iA<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/tKLWv5rHtW<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) July 6, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
What Is Multi-cloud?<\/strong>
\nBy the simplest definition, every company is probably a \u201cmulti-cloud\u201d company. If you use Gmail for your business and literally any other service, you\u2019re technically multi-cloud. But, for our purposes, we\u2019re talking about the public cloud platforms you use to build your startup\u2019s infrastructure\u2014storage, compute, and networking. In this sense, multi-cloud means using two or more infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers that complement each other rather than relying on AWS or Google to source all of the infrastructure and services you need in your tech stack.<\/div>\nWaiting Until Demand Spikes<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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