Infrastructure

Managed Services Always

Engineers should focus on the product, not setting up services that are already solved. Managed services have more ROI than custom infrastructure for most companies.

• Vercel, serverless, managed databases, managed observability.
• Custom infra only when managed services cannot meet specific requirements (compliance, scale, cost).

Phase-Dependent Decisions

Infrastructure choices evolve with the product phase:

• Prototyping: maximize speed. Vercel, managed everything. No production environment needed yet.
• Pre-release: production readiness requires more control. May move to cloud providers (GCP, AWS) with Terraform and CI/CD.
• Scale: performance bottlenecks drive specific decisions. Elasticsearch for search, read replicas, caching layers.

Each phase has different constraints. The infrastructure that was right for prototyping may be wrong for production.

Security and Performance

Pragmatic and phase-dependent. Customer personal information is always critical. Beyond that, risk tolerance depends on company phase.

• External security audits before production launch.
• For performance: define what “bad” looks like, move fast until monitoring shows problems.
• Monitoring is the key — you cannot optimize what you cannot see.

Evolution

• Feb 2026 — initial version from IDENTITY.md infrastructure positions and architecture evolution article.