Let me prefix this rant/post by stating that I come from the more scrappy, ‘build it out from OSS’ sort of shop, so I am highly biased toward the approach of:

• Thinking first about, and then building, your infrastructure/solution to fit your needs.
• Knowing the software inside and out.
• Relying on the community for the rest.

Over the converse ‘Enterprise’ approach of:

• Building your infrastructure based on someone’s white paper on how you should build an infrastructure to do X.
• Getting your sysadmins a set of meaningless certifications.
• Ultimately relying on commercial support as your last point of escalation.

Yes, yes, yes… this is very snobby and I am in danger of sounding as irreverent as Ted Dzuiba.  I am also wholly conscious that OSS approach can be taken in the same extreme direction as the enterprise approach. in so much that everyone blindly follows the same design choices that Twitter or Facebook are doing (albeit better than anyone else) or are implementing everything in node.js or Ruby on Rails because that is what the hot-as-shit hipster developers are doing.

For me it comes down to having operational responsibility for your infrastructure, rather than a support contract.  But still, I’m young and work at a hot startup; when I’m CTO of a bank maybe my view will change

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