sugarcode

slony offers some compelling advantages over streaming replication - even on new databases we setup, we still like slony for several reasons:

* Version upgrades (streaming replication requires the same PG version between master/slave, slony does not)

* Logical replication gives us finer-grained control over how data is replicated across the cluster

* Ability to create additional indexes on slaves

slony isn't perfect and it has caused us some headaches, but its flexibility makes it our go-to replication tool for postgres.

Hardware or software? There's some hacks with TPROXY/HAproxy I've seen that would do the transparent proxy but the setup seems like more trouble than it's worth.

One downside of this approach (without some funky iptables/networking-fu) is that you loose the source IP from the original request. Adding headers like X-Forwarded-For only works after the request has been decrypted, so all the traffic will appear to source from the load balancer, which can present its own issues.

IMO (and I believe Google agrees - http://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.ht...) the advantages of terminating SSL at the load balancer outweigh the horizontal scalability of this approach, at least in most cases.

Great points. We've actually deployed additional caching on the frontend, and Varnish should be appearing on future slides.

One big advantage of rsyslog over syslog-ng is that you can spool messages to disk if the remote syslog server is down (syslog-ng only offers this in their 'enterprise' paid version).

One option you have is to look at portfolio companies for the major VC's to see if they are looking for developers and are tackling problems that are interesting to you. Some examples:

http://jobs.sequoiacap.com/ http://www.usvp.com/ http://jobs.kpcb.com/

This would get your foot in the door of the "world of start-ups" without taking the plunge of doing your own thing.

I feel your pain. Recently, I also graduated from college with a startup side project that just acquired its first customer. The last twelve months I've spent alot of time asking entrepreneurs (including a Silicon Valley VC) about what they thought, and the consensus I've gathered is make your mistakes in the first year or two with a large company rather than sink your own ship. Not sure what your internship experiences have been, but there are many non-technical skills that are valuable to have and can only be acquired through experience.

Of course, alot of this depends on your window of opportunity with this startup venture. Is speed to market and large funding critical to your success? If so, it'll be difficult to get $$$ with a full-time job on the side. On the other hand, if you're pursuing niche customers ((http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...)) and bootstrapping your way to success , having supplemental income can be very handy.

I personally have decided to keep the dayjob for at least a year to build up some cash and learn some of the soft skills needed to be a well-rounded founder. Having less time to work doesn't mean you can't build something meaningful and useful; it just means you need to be more efficient with the time you have.

Best of luck!