I'm curious about the projects people bring to you that were initially deployed to a PAAS. What bottlenecks or breaking points cause people to bring those projects to you for help? For example does it tend to be a steady increase in cost, an increase in complexity with add-ons, or something else? Do you always move those projects to a deployment stack that you know well and are familiar with, or do you try to keep people where they are, but with a cleaner setup?
Hey Eric!
Most of the times someone brings us in on a project deployed on a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) it’s actually NOT because of any issues they’re having with the PaaS itself.
It’s often because their business, not tech, has matured to a place where they want real ops staff, 24/7/365 on-call coverage, etc.
We always move them to Kubernetes, in some fashion. Different cloud providers for different reasons (often costs for them) and we’re even experimenting with single instance k3s in some smaller situations.
This isn’t some huge ringing endorsement of Kubernetes, it’s so all of our customers are deployed in roughly the same manner. So we can use a small common set of tools and tooling we can become experts in, rather than spending time figuring out how “to do Redis” on yet another PaaS.
But it is very often, as you guessed it, cost.
Or they need something you’d call an Add-On in a PaaS world that either doesn’t exist or they can’t use in some way. It’s too slow a couple extra network hops away or they need the “2k user plan” and it tops out at “1k” or whatever.
Sometimes it is just frustration with the PaaS or Add-On provider’s recent reliability if they’ve been having some recurring issues that have impacted the business.
PaaS platforms remove a ton of day to day complexity for developers who don’t want to mess with ops issues, but at a higher cost than traditional IaaS providers like AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, etc.
It’s usually the right call for solo founders and small teams as they begin, but it is something you out grow as your business grows. Either for costs, reliability, or features but usually some combination of those that makes it attractive to move off.
