Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
Startups spend innovation tokens very poorly.<p>Progamming languages, hosting platforms and non-standard databases aren&#x27;t ideal places to spend such tokens.<p>For most apps what you want is JVM or .NET, PostgreSQL or MySQL or SQL Server, k8s or vanilla VMs&#x2F;containers.<p>You almost never want different programming languages to these mature stacks, you might think you do, but you don&#x27;t. Node.js&#x2F;Python&#x2F;Ruby etc all promise a fast start but in reality any perceptible velocity benefit is dead within months, usually before anything of value is shipped. Most of it has to with ecosystems (library quality etc, framework maturity) but those also being the 2 most advanced managed runtimes helps a ton.<p>For databases just standard RDBMS is almost always the way to go, unless you startup is intrinsically a data startup and you know ahead of time you require very special properties you just want one of these.<p>Keep hosting simple. Don&#x27;t use any fangdangled &quot;serverless&quot; nonsense. It&#x27;s not worth it, shipping a week or 2 later because you took the time to setup EKS&#x2F;GKE&#x2F;AKS will pay off in spades. k8s reputation for complexity isn&#x27;t warranted and it&#x27;s essentially standard now and will remain that way.<p>So now you have freed up your innovation tokens you can spend them on solutions to your actual business problems instead of on stuff that will only continue to eat your token budget and often yield negative real returns.