PaaS

Overview Last week I argued that mid-market platform teams are stuck between two roads — build an internal platform you can’t staff, or rent a PaaS you outgrow. A few people pushed back on the second road: is renting really that bad? The DX is incredible and the bill is tiny. They’re right, for a while. So this post is the honest version of the rent-it math. Not “PaaS is bad” — it isn’t — but where the curve bends, and why the bend catches teams by surprise. ...

Overview There is a size of engineering organization that platform tooling has quietly failed. If you are Google, you build your platform. You have twenty engineers who work on nothing but the platform, and the leverage is obvious: one paved road, used by a thousand developers, pays for itself many times over. If you are four people with a Rails app and a deadline, you rent a platform. You push to a branch, a preview URL appears, and you have never once thought about an ingress controller. That is the correct trade. ...