Why Should Startups Use Cloud Managed Services?
Your startup is hosted on AWS, Google Cloud, or another platform. You've already agreed to swap fixed costs for variable costs and ditch data centers for cloud services.
Now, you believe you've done enough and your startup is prepared for the sudden growth in demand, traffic, and workload.
Surprise, surprise. Your infrastructure crumbles and doesn't support your needs.
You need to scale.
Start-ups are drawn to a model sometimes referred to as "rolling your own".
Your startup mentality kicks in and you opt to do everything in-house. Which is impossible. You don't have the money nor the 24/7 availability to ensure your infrastructure supports your business continuity and scaling needs.
Cloud managed services are probably the last thing on your mind... but you should definitely pause and re-evaluate your priorities.
We often see developers at startups build their local proof of concept with open-source software and tools. When it's time to host their application online or scale-up, they must either refactor part of their code to use Cloud services or keep it as is and bear more operational work and higher costs.
On the other hand, Cloud managed service specialists build, maintain, and run cloud-managed server instances, storage, RAM, and networking. They're efficient, reliable, and available. They reduce complexity, improve security, and keep you flexible and focused.
Before you choose your tech stack, you need to think about how it will grow with your business.
You don't want to build a minimum viable product, gain some traction, and then have to rebuild your application when it needs to grow. You simply may not have the time or the heads-up you need. You need to be ready now.
So, you should ask yourself: if you succeed, can your infrastructure handle the demands of your business growth needs?
Choosing Your Architecture: What's the Best Approach?
Think about the following questions when choosing the architecture for your application:
Operational work
How long and how much work does it take to keep your system running? Think about tasks like updating versions, patching, updating, and deploying software. Will you and your team have to spend a lot of time on these tasks? Remember that the time you don't spend on infrastructure operations can be used to make your product more valuable.
The upfront and large-scale costs of infrastructure
How much will it cost your company at different stages of growth to run your stacks? This is very important because it often determines how much money you'll need to start your business and how profitable it can be. Since cash is king, the less your business spends, the better. Investors are looking for businesses that use services that already exist and focus on making money.
Related: 6 Reasons Why You Need Cloud Scalability
Complexity
How complicated will a certain stack get overtime if you choose it? Keep things as simple as possible so you can move faster and take less risk. The more technologies, vendor products, and software you add to your product, the bigger and more specialized your IT staff will need to be. This could drive up costs and increase operational work.
Infrastructure vs. building features
Does using a certain service help you build features for your customers faster? Product market fit doesn't always come from having a perfect product architecture. Instead, it often comes from iterating through features.
Agility
How quickly can you add a new feature and how quickly can you change directions if you need to?
The main reason for using Cloud and managed services is that they make things more flexible. Using managed services, you can switch gears quickly and come up with new ideas more quickly.
Reliability
You should make sure your application has as few mistakes as possible, but it can be hard to keep that level of consistency and reliability. With managed services, our skilled cloud experts will take care of everything your startup needs.
They will make sure your infrastructure is correctly setup, managed, and optimized.
Availability
Does your app have to be up and running all the time?
It's not easy to be very available. What will happen to your app if your data center, an availability zone, or a region goes down? Managed services are always highly available and are run by “the Cloud”, so you don't have to worry about them.
Security
How strong will your security be if you build your own service? Security should be one of your business's top priorities from the start, but it's a hard problem to solve. Security work adds a lot of extra work to the development process and can make it take longer to come up with new ideas. Cloud folks have highly skilled teams of security engineers who work with product teams to make sure managed services are as safe as possible.
Unless you’re an infrastructure start-up, it is a safe bet that cloud infrastructure experts will always be a more secure and reliable option.
Schedule a free consultation here.
How Long Does It Take To Get Something to Market?
When you use managed services, you don't have to start from scratch. Instead, you can keep your business small and focus on making your product better.
Portability
Will you need to move your application on-premises or to another Cloud provider? In this situation, you might want to think about starting your own service. But you can still use managed services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which let you automatically deploy, scale, and manage Kubernetes.
Then, it's easy to move containers to another Kubernetes cluster on a different platform.
Customization
Does your business need a high level of customization? If so, rolling your own service could be helpful because you can make it fit your needs exactly. But if this kind of customization isn't important to your success, we suggest that you think about using managed services.
Why Are Cloud Managed Services Better For Startups?
Before you start writing code or putting open-source software on a server, you should know what your options are. This will help you start building the right way, move quickly to beat the market, and make a product that will grow as your business does.
Before deciding on a way to move forward, it pays to stop thinking "build first" and do some research to see what's out there.
AWS and Google Cloud have managed services for most common use cases, so it's likely that you could use an existing solution for your app. As a general rule, you should use a managed service if there is one that fits your needs.
If you use these services instead of setting them up yourself, you won't have to do as much work, you'll have peace of mind, and you'll be able to focus on adding value to your business instead of doing operational work.
Pricing models also allow you to only pay for what you use. This gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility. This lets you start your business without having to pay a lot of money upfront, which could kill it.
Need to optimize your costs on Cloud infrastructure management? We can help! Contact us today.
The Challenge for Startups and Entrepreneurs
Startups and entrepreneurs usually have a small budget, limited time, and few resources. You use Cloud services because they are flexible, but you find that you have to spend a lot of time managing them yourself.
You don't want to have to look through pages of Cloud services to figure out what you need, but you also don't want to be stuck with one vendor.
If you want to start your project off on the right foot, you might want to think about a Cloud-native approach. Even though you can't see the future, you can think about where your application will be hosted, what managed services you already have, and how it will run at scale.
Afterwards, think about the programming languages, frameworks, software, and tools you will need. If you take this approach, you'll be able to make the best choice for your first deployment.
Startups and Cloud Managed Services
Sitech knows that you are working quickly and on a tight budget and that your needs are always changing. We have years of experience with networking, so we can help you set up the best network for your needs and help it grow as you do.
Instead of looking into different Cloud services or keeping track of when free trials end, give us a call or send us an email and tell us about yourself.
Our goal is to help you stay small and focused by paying attention to and optimizing your technology needs. When you work with Sitech, you get access to a team of certified Cloud specialists and DevOps engineers.
Sitech's Certified Cloud Managed Services can help your startup grow and expand at a faster rate. These services are designed to meet all the key needs of a growing startup.
Contact us today for a free consultation or you can schedule a free assessment of your startup infrastructure here.