Founder Advice: Choosing the Right Cloud Infrastructure Can Make a Big Difference

A letter to a Young Founder

It might not make or break your business, but choosing the right cloud provider can make a big difference in how bumpy the road to success will be.

For example, I work with a SAAS provider whose customers are primarily other companies (rather than individuals). It has to support different authentication mechanisms (emails vs sms), policies and integrations per customer. Getting all the features we needed out of Azure or GCloud would have required months of serious engineering effort. With AWS Cognito we got everything we needed out of the box.

In another instance, a client’s business was founded on a complex set of integrated ETL (Extraction Transformation Loading) pipelines, each completely containerized but requiring different resources (32 cores here, 8 cores there). Running these on Gcloud required a set of coordinated bash scripts that spun up resources and cleaned them up afterwards (you don’t want a 32 core 128GB machine running any longer than it has to!). On AWS, we were able to use the Batch facility to deploy the pipeline’s with very little effort.

So I encourage you you examine your situation before you start spending the credits your accelerator has given you (especially if you are boot-strapped and paying out of pocket). One of the cloud providers might just have one or two features that’ll give you time to concentrate on building out your core product and finding that elusive market fit.