While ops certainly has its place (and an important one at that), there has to be a line where it simply isnt reasonable to hire a dedicated ops person. For example, if you have no users you dont need to worry that servers never go down, that email isnt being routed, that user data is backed up, etc. Speaking as someone building a company with no dedicated ops, I think that the line is somewhere around: as soon as you can afford it. Before that, (i.e. pre-revenue) it seems like a pre-optimization. On the other hand, backups (especially of the software) are not inherently an ops issue. Developers deal with backups all the time (e.g. git, svn, cvs, dropbox, etc.).
> Developers deal with backups all the time (e.g. git, svn, cvs, dropbox, etc.).
Those are not backups, they are merely information stores.
I have seen time and time again that restoring a site from zero is extremely painful due to how poor most developer tools are. In fact, some tools that are designed to "make things easier" actually don't make them easier for ops folks when things break. A personal bugaboo is startup scripts that aren't "portable" between shells. That might sound overly annoying, but when you discover that your SW isn't starting due to differences in environment variables in a dev vs prod environment that should never have been there, it'll make more sense.
Comments
While ops certainly has its place (and an important one at that), there has to be a line where it simply isnt reasonable to hire a dedicated ops person. For example, if you have no users you dont need to worry that servers never go down, that email isnt being routed, that user data is backed up, etc. Speaking as someone building a company with no dedicated ops, I think that the line is somewhere around: as soon as you can afford it. Before that, (i.e. pre-revenue) it seems like a pre-optimization. On the other hand, backups (especially of the software) are not inherently an ops issue. Developers deal with backups all the time (e.g. git, svn, cvs, dropbox, etc.).
> Developers deal with backups all the time (e.g. git, svn, cvs, dropbox, etc.).
Those are not backups, they are merely information stores. I have seen time and time again that restoring a site from zero is extremely painful due to how poor most developer tools are. In fact, some tools that are designed to "make things easier" actually don't make them easier for ops folks when things break. A personal bugaboo is startup scripts that aren't "portable" between shells. That might sound overly annoying, but when you discover that your SW isn't starting due to differences in environment variables in a dev vs prod environment that should never have been there, it'll make more sense.