Infrastructure for a small team: when to use a platform and when to own the hardware
A small team doesn’t need its own sysadmin. It needs a clear rule for when to reach for a managed platform and when to reach for its own server.
Infrastructure is an area where small companies often pay twice. They either have an overpriced solution they can’t make use of, or a cheap server nobody looks after. I try to decide by a simple rule: applications go on a managed platform, heavy data goes on your own hardware.
Applications: a managed platform
For web applications, APIs and frontends I use platforms like Zerops. Deployment from Git, separate environments, scaling and backups are handled by the platform. The team doesn’t have to deal with system updates, and deploying a new version is a matter of a commit. For a small team that’s a huge saving, because the infrastructure doesn’t need a person of its own.
Heavy data: a dedicated server
But there are workloads where a managed platform doesn’t pay off. Typically large data sets that get processed over and over. For one platform with locations all over the world, I built a custom mapping stack on top of OpenStreetMap: geocoding with Nominatim, search with Photon and queries with Overpass, over data for the entire planet. That needs a dedicated server with lots of memory and fast disks, for example from OVH. On a regular cloud, the same performance would cost significantly more.
CI/CD as a safety net
Wherever the application runs, deployment has to be automated and tested. A pipeline that runs the tests, including end-to-end tests, and only then deploys matters more for a small team than for a large one. A small team has nobody to catch bugs by hand.
How to decide
- Does the application change often and need to scale? Managed platform.
- Does it process huge amounts of data over and over, with a predictable load? Your own hardware.
- Will nobody be looking after the server regularly? Definitely a managed platform.
The most expensive infrastructure is the kind nobody looks after.