A way for startups to build a solid IT infrastructure (2017)

https://about.gitlab.com/2017/08/07/how-startups-build-it-infrastructure/

by PascLeRasc • 7 years ago

88 39 7 years ago

about.gitlab.com

j7k6• 7 years ago

[...], we use a private mail server.

I will always recommend against running your own mail infrastructure. The administrative expense is to high in the long run. Unless you want to employ a 24/7 on-call admin team, Office365 is always the better choice. Email encryption can still be done client side (SMIME/PGP).

arethuza2• 7 years ago

"running your own mail infrastructure" - I once got responsibility for a complex email nightmare dumped on me (tens of thousands of users, hundreds of domains, hundreds of servers) and I had no idea the vast number of entertaining ways email infrastructure can be screwed up.

Mind you - I guess at a small scale it might be OK - but infrastructure like email is both vital and utterly thankless. Let someone else do it.....

PostPost2• 7 years ago

Still have nightmares from my first job in help desk, sweating bullets while handling decades of Outlook .pst files for a C-level in my company. Only place they existed were on the laptop itself, and a cheap 250GB external drive.

Email sucks.

dano• 7 years ago

I agree that one should not host their own mail server these days, however, do the business, clients, and employees a favor and evaluate something in other than Outlook and Exchange based email systems.

diminoten4• 7 years ago

What's wrong with Office 365?

Ascetik• 7 years ago

I agree, there are tons of good options out there, such as ProtonMail or others. As a sysadmin, who no longer works in the MSP world, managing Exchange was such a huge time-sink. There is reason basically every MSP who is worth their salt will migrate their clients to O365 or some other solution. It works. There is relatively little down time. And you barely have to manage it. It's a win-win for everyone.

lwhalen• 7 years ago

I've been running email servers for my personal and business email for nigh on two decades now. It's "an hour or two of maintenance a quarter", on average, and is nowhere near as big of a deal as many would make it out to be. Is it 100% perfect? Certainly not. Would it be 'easier' (FSVO) to just give my email to gmail/O365/fastmail? Probably. However, I feel "the net" was meant to be (and works best as) a series of decentralized systems. Feeding my data into a 'just this side of a walled-garden' ecosystem does not help the net, so I don't do it.

Roark66• 7 years ago

I only skimmed the article, so perhaps I missed it, but it seems there is no mention of any central user authentication/authorisation solution or personal certificate storage like Active Directory. Every IT infrastructure that is expected to scale beyond few users has to include a component like this to manage users, their certificates(or keys), access rights etc.

peterwwillis• 7 years ago

And they're missing a ticketing system, a CRM, a wiki, an inventory database, etc, to say nothing of the actual computing infrastructure.

It's kind of insane to run a business on free software. If your CalDAV server suddenly has a bug with a partner who uses Apple/Windows/etc calendar, what are you gonna do? Drop everything else to start debugging? Call and tell them to switch calendars for you? Abandon them?

loudmax• 7 years ago

Attitudes like this are what leads to systematic vendor lock-in and monopolies. If an open source system can't communicate with a proprietary system, the bug is one of these systems not following open standards.

inceptivecss• 7 years ago

Regardless of what you paid for a piece of software, if it is critical to your business operations you should be paying someone to maintain it for you.

If you were a small lawn mowing company and happened to receive a free mower for your operations, you wouldn't just run it into the ground without regularly paying someone to keep it in good repair (though this analogy does raise some interesting thoughts about companies in general and their maintenance policies).

In exactly the same way, you shouldn't be using software of any kind, paid or not, without having some plan for maintenance and repair.

If free software can cover the same business needs as paid software, there's no reason to not use it. But you absolutely cannot sacrifice maintenance just because you did or didn't pay money for the software itself.

gregoryexe• 7 years ago

Just buy a couple Synology's, that will get you 90% there.

naasking• 7 years ago

You're being downvoted, but for small businesses Synology is pretty good. They now even come with Docker, full virtualization and Active Directory built-in, and they've had clustering and easy automated failover for years now. You pay a bit of a premium, but it does make it easy.

jermaustin1• 7 years ago

I just heard of this because of your comment, these little servers seem like a good deal for not having to do anything yourself really, especially for under 2000USD.

tvanantwerp• 7 years ago

If you're not paying in cash, you're paying in time and attention it takes to manage everything yourself. I would never recommend that a start-up self host email or very much else. This is a list of things to distract your team from focusing on building product and selling it.

SketchySeaBeast• 7 years ago

Yeah, I kind of assumed that the answer would be to solve your problems with office 365 or something similar and then move onto actually producing yourself.

Retric2• 7 years ago

It’s a question of risk and cash flow. Internal IT infrastructure can represent far lower burn rates which may be an excellent tradeoff or a poor one based on several factors.

Are you spending your personal savings or a 100 million dollar funding round, etc.

jupp0r3• 7 years ago

If $5/(user * month) for google suite is imposing cash flow problems then you should fix that rather than spend your time administering your own email server.

holychiz• 7 years ago

I'm with the majority of the comments here. It seems an expensive way to run your business. Initial cost is usually a small part of the overall TCO. This post was written in 2017, any updates on their experience with this infrastructure? Prove us doubters wrong.

teddyh4• 7 years ago

“If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what.”

— Joel Spolsky, In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-...

jupp0r3• 7 years ago

Implementing your own email/file sync/identity server sounds like great advice for any startup to get going.

In your in-house programming language, of course.

teddyh4• 7 years ago

I believe you are being insincere and/or sarcastic. This does not help, and it would have been more useful to make actual arguments.

relaunched• 7 years ago

It feels a bit like it misunderstands what IT infrastructure is all about. Identity and Access Management is noticeably missing AND core to IT infrastructure.

Aaronstotle• 7 years ago

I'm very surprised to see that they chose Arch Linux for their base OS, very curious to see if that ever lead to issues over the last two years.

A way for startups to build a solid IT infrastructure (2017)

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