Thursday, November 08, 2007

File for the mythical startup - operations

I have a small collection of these "pearls" of startup wisdom. Come the day I'll be able to find them all, using my newest tag - "startup" (it'll take a while for me to tag the back posts): 

Operations is a competitive advantage... (Secret Sauce for Startups!)

...In my experience it takes about 80 hours to bootstrap a startup. This generally means installing and configuring an automated infrastructure management system (puppet), version control system (subversion), continuous build and test (frequently cruisecontrol.rb), software deployment (capistrano), monitoring (currently evaluating Hyperic, Zenoss, and Groundwork). Once this is done the "install time" is reduced to nearly zero and requires no specialized knowledge. This is the first ingredient in "Operations Secret Sauce".

This kind of scaleability becomes really interesting when you find yourself suddenly popular, as iLike did when it launched its Facebook app and had to scale up fast (Radar)...

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