Startups and The Cloud

The “cloud” has really taken off this past year. Despite a few outages it is obvious that the players involved are very serious about making it work and work well. It started as a place to store things but there are now companies putting their database, their messaging, and everything else in the cloud. Part of me is bummed about the future because buying and playing with servers and hardware is a lot of fun, but I can recognize a shift when I see it. The cloud seems like a perfect companion to startups, allowing a company to grow linearly as customers and business warrant instead of having to drop painfully large clumps of capital on gear (leasing helps some). It also removes uncertainty about being able to handle future load – predicting future load as a startup with no history is really tough. You either buy hardware too early (big $$$ wasted) or don’t have enough and your services go down. With the cloud yet another obstacle to bootstrapping is removed.

Things Have Changed Fast

The wild part to me is the speed with which this has happened. I helped start my current company ~3 years ago (wow that feels like a long time). We moved into our first office about 6 months after starting. At first it was two of us on our personal laptops working on the borrowed desks of a local consultancy that was helping build version 1 of the software. When we moved into our own office, I built a machine from parts and setup Exchange and that was the start of our “corporate IT”. Production was served up by leased servers colocated at a hosting facility through a reseller. Putting things in the cloud wasn’t an option at all.

We’ve changed the infrastructure a lot (want to blog more about the things tried, what has worked best, and the current setup – possibly at the company blog if not here) but it has always been services installed and hosted on servers I setup. We have a good bit of hardware now so I don’t see us going 100% AWS or similar, but am starting to feel like exploring more what can be pushed off our gear is a priority. We use google docs a lot as a company but could be doing a lot more.

Tomorrow’s Startups

My main point in this ramble is simply to state that if I was starting a new company today, it would make complete sense to put almost everything in the cloud. My paranoid personality would probably cause a server to be in place for a fast, local file share and backup for data/files in the cloud but most storage, production, qa, source control, documents, corporate email, etc could be pushed off to whatever cloud players makes the most sense (weighing more management/oversight/support with cost and staff skills/time). It made sense for IT items some time ago but now makes just as must sense for products and production.

It makes me want to hack on something on the side that goes out of its way to leverage the cloud just so I can force myself to get more familiar with it. Also, Cloud Camp Atlanta sounds cool.