Key Factors in Choosing a Cloud Provider for Your Start-up
Choosing the right compute cloud, or backend platform, is one of the many strategic decisions you'll make as a start-up. The cloud infrastructure you select will shape your ability to scale, innovate, and control costs—key factors when operating with lean resources and ambitious goals. In this post, we’ll break down the critical factors to consider when choosing a cloud platform and why serverless and infraless solutions are an ideal choice for fast-growth start-ups looking to accelerate without the burden of managing infrastructure.
In our experience, the most important things a start-up should look for in a cloud is:
- Simplicity and Agility: Your cloud should empower your team, and reduce your time-to-market and cost of changes. Having time to and being able to easily and quickly test new features, maintain your product, or even pivot your entire idea is paramount.
- Scalability: Growth might come rapidly and explosively, and you need a cloud that can grow seamlessly with your business, handling sudden spikes in traffic without breaking a sweat.
- Cost-effectiveness: Every dollar counts, especially in the early stages. Look for pricing models that align with your usage patterns and don't burden you with unnecessary costs.
- Reliability and Performance: Users expect snappy, responsive applications. Ensure your cloud solution can deliver the performance your applications and users demand - and that it is reliable, with high availability.
- Security and Compliance: Data breaches can be catastrophic for a young company. As they become more common and regulations more stringent, robust security measures and compliance features are essential.
Next, we’ll dive into each point a bit further.
1. Simplicity and Agility: Innovate and Iterate Faster
For start-ups, time is a key asset. The faster you can bring your product to market, the more competitive you become. Serverless and infraless solutions empowers your developers to focus on product instead of Ops. This means you can deploy new features or entire applications in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional infrastructure.
Serverless platforms, built with CI/CD pipelines, removes the time-consuming tasks of provision, scaling, and managing servers—the cloud platform handles all of that automatically. This means you can deploy new features or entire applications in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional infrastructure. Infraless computing takes this a step further, eliminating even the concept of infrastructure from the developer's mindset, allowing for rapid prototyping and iteration. This is possible because a lot of the tools that a developers would normally have to learn and set up to run on cloud are abstracted away, reducing cognitive load, and because the platform architecture makes it possible to develop and test changes directly in production with no risk, and deploying them with zero downtime (aka rolling updates), in ~10 seconds.
The result? Faster feedback loops, more time for continuous innovation and iteration, and significantly faster time-to-market, delivering value to your users quickly and efficiently.
2. Scalability: Grow without worrying about cloud resources
Start-ups are geared to grow, and their cloud platform must enable this. Whether it’s sudden spikes in traffic or gradual increases in user base, your chosen backend must be able to handle it.
Traditional cloud demands resource planning, manual provisioning, and risks of either over- or under-provisioning, taking time away from other tasks and slowing down. Serverless and infraless cloud auto-scales to infinity and back down to zero, requiring no involvement from your team. By utilizing event-driven compute services, your code only runs when necessary, reducing both overhead and costs.
For this to work in real life and give users the experience they want, the cloud must have zero cold-starts, meaning a non-running service should start instantly, and this is where many serverless offers struggle to deliver the required performance (Psst!: Merrymake doesn’t, with cascading cold-starts of ~100 milliseconds - check out our benchmark).
The benefits are the same as above: instead of provisioning and maintaining cloud resources and infrastructure, you and your team can focus on building your product and business.
3. Cost Efficiency: Pay Only for What You Use
Tight budgets are the norm for start-ups, and surprise infrastructure costs can hurt. Traditional cloud setups have a couple of common pitfalls in this regard: underestimating costs or over-provisioning resources (i.e. wasting money on things you end up not using). Serverless computing offers a pay-per-use model, charging only for actual resource usage. This means no more guessing your capacity needs or paying for idle infrastructure. Additionally, built-in cost monitoring tools give you real-time control over spending, ensuring your budget stays predictable and scalable.
Remember to factor in not just the direct costs of cloud resources, but also potential savings in operational overhead and time-to-market. A slightly more expensive cloud solution that offers better automation and management tools might actually be more cost-effective in the long run by enabling your developers to go from DevOps to NoOps, focused only on the product.
4. Reliability and Performance: Focus on Product, Not Downtime
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, performance can make or break a start-up. Users expect lightning-fast load times and seamless interactions, regardless of the complexity behind the scenes. Downtime can seriously damage your reputation and user experience.
Traditional cloud infrastructure can be reliable, but it requires more effort, as scaling, redundancy and failover mechanisms, fault-tolerant infrastructure, and updates are all set up and managed by the user (i.e. you and your team). Serverless and infraless platforms are designed with high availability in mind, through built-in features like auto-scaling, automated failover and redundancy mechanisms, and managed updates.
While both serverless/infraless and traditional cloud platforms can be made highly reliable and available, serverless and infraless solutions typically offer these benefits with less effort and overhead. Combined with SLAs that guarantee +99.9% uptime, you can confidently focus on delivering value to your users, knowing your infrastructure won’t let you down.
5. Security and Compliance: Built-In Protection for Peace of Mind
In an era of increasing cyber threats and stringent data protection regulations, security and compliance should be top priorities when choosing a cloud. We mentioned that downtime can damage your reputation; security breaches will tank it.
On traditional clouds, you are responsible for a lot of components. On top of the coginitive load that learning and using them places on developers, there is the risk of e.g. misconfiguring a tool or access controls, or forgetting to install security updates, all of which can expose you to attacks. Compliance brings another load of unproductive tasks, because you have to ensure that all the different tools you use have the right certifications. Serverless and infraless platforms come equipped with built-in security features like encryption, access controls, and update management, and a host of certifications, alleviating much of the security and compliance burden from your team.
In summary, on a traditional cloud your team is responsible for securing a broad attack surface, whereas a provider of serverless and infraless cloud handles a lot of that for you.
