That means that I need to know about (and program chef to do):

logging

security hardening

firewalls

backups (both point in time and complete backups, both for database and for any other artifacts like image uploads)

testing backup recovery (both the point in time and complete backups)

replication

HA

LB

SSL termination

postgresql configuration

monitoring (security, system stats, application availability, individual process running)

performance analysis (both at application and system level)

method for deploying updates (to the application and to the system)

and the list goes on... you could easily make a career out of focusing on postgresql configuration, for example. these aren't simple things to do.

Different providers have different limitations on what you can do here. For example, AWS doesn't support multicast, which limits your options for doing High Availability.

Know about? Program Chef to do? How about: be on call 24/7 to handle random problems in? The best, most competent ops teams can all tell you horror stories about black swan outages traceable to some of the least likely components in the stack you just outlined.

Almost all of the things you outlined are things that have in the past blown up in real world deployments, often at cloud hosting providers where you didn't know about it it because a well-paid, well-trained ops team hid the drama for you.

So yeah, definitely factor that in to the cost of hosting at a cloud provider. You're absolutely right.

I think before you put an app on the public Internet for people to consume, you should be comfortable with everything you listed plus more. You might not be doing it for the app at hand, but you should know it at least. Especially if you're doing a solo founder thing, you might be having to implement all of these things before you can afford ops. If you're deploying services without some of the knowledge in your list, too, you're setting yourself up for trouble.

It's not an insurmountable barrier, for sure. Knowing how to operate your own code is a great feeling.

You do realize that it's a 6-figure investment to hire an engineer comfortable with all of those things plus more to deploy a multihomed setup?

A) My comment was very specifically focused on you, acting as a solo developer/founder, not a person you'd hire.

B) A multihomed setup is not a black box of mystery, and is nowhere near as expensive as people are saying from the hip.

> My comment was very specifically focused on you, acting as a solo developer/founder, not a person you'd hire.

Then "you," having acquired years of experience in designing and implementing distributed services, are making at least a 6-figure investment in opportunity cost.