Arguably, most of these places do not need dedicated ops teams, nor do they need to host and manage their own infrastructure, yet they do.

The most productive startup I worked at used Heroku to bootstrap many of their applications and we didn’t need a single ops person. People were able to switch between teams and follow the same short and standardized process to build and deploy code. They didn’t need to ‘master’ any specialized ops skills and there was typically someone on each team who could quickly debug failing deploys.

The least efficient startup I worked at insisted on hosting all their own infra because managed solutions like Heroku were ‘too expensive’. Except we ended up with multi-month long infrastructure rollouts, process additions, changes and infra upgrades that likely cost many orders of magnitude more than managed solutions to implement, with less features than we’d get out of the box with a managed service like Heroku. We also had nowhere near the scale necessary, or headcount, for it to be worth it to self-manage.

I’m typically the guy who works on the backend but also gets called in for ops and infrastructure work, and at least for smaller companies that aren’t dealing with hundreds of millions of requests per day, I think the managed route makes way more sense, even if you feel like you’re overspending on infrastructure.