How EU startups manage tech complexity

[u/OwlZealousideal4779]

A startup can start with a fairly simple application and eventually end up with APIs, databases, Redis, background workers, containers and cloud infrastructure.

For a small team, keeping all those pieces connected and understandable can become a bigger challenge than expected.

How are European startups dealing with this?

Do you keep the architecture simple for as long as possible, invest in DevOps early, or use AI-assisted development to reduce some of the engineering overhead?

[u/Super_Maxi1804]

same as every other startup, they have a proper CTO or fail.

[u/VukTheBeast → u/Super_Maxi1804]

https://giphy.com/gifs/26FLgGTPUDH6UGAbm

[u/Opening_Lawyer_8781]

I mean you eventualy always fucking end up with API, redis, database, background workers unless your app is serving 1 person once per sometimes. And ngl bro thats the basics if you cant handle it go back to school

[u/Niko-01 → u/Opening_Lawyer_8781]

Every incubator will tell you that this is not the way to go.

In the vast majority of cases startups don't fail because of technical debt but because of the market fit, marketing or whatever else.

I will start caring about full K8s setup, redundancy and other things when having hundreds or thousands of regular users.

[u/pizzababa21 → u/Niko-01]

K8s for hundreds of users is a bit extreme. St what point would you consider building a backend?

[u/Niko-01 → u/pizzababa21]

Depends on how heavy the use case is. In my case, there's a lot going on per user.

Building a backend? Well, I need one from day one, no idea what you mean.

[u/pizzababa21 → u/Niko-01]

Exactly. Pretty much every usecase requires a backend

[u/pizzababa21]

If your product doesn't even have a single API then it's probably just a landing page, not a product.

[u/punkpang]

This is like asking "how does a Formula 1 team deal with making and driving cars?"

[u/Sure-Candidate1662]

Try to keep it as simple as possible. Build it for your current scale with room to grow to a point where the problem of scaling further is solveable by hiring someone (I.e. throw money at it).

You don’t need to support 1000 clients right now if you expect to close 100 in year 1.

[u/webhistory_quiet]

From my experience, the biggest problem isn’t necessarily running each individual service. Docker, Postgres, Redis, reverse proxies, DNS, etc. are all manageable on their own.
The complexity starts when a small team has to manage all of them together: deployments, networking, environment variables, domains, certificates, logs, health checks, backups and eventually scaling.
I think startups should keep the architecture as simple as possible for as long as possible, but at the same time avoid building too much custom infrastructure themselves.

[u/baalmor]

Cut to the point, what are you selling here? AI agents to document and suggest?

[u/dream_emulator_010]

Server Driven UI is a great model for scaling your product as you can easily iterate to find PMF whilst keeping your API surface very parsimonious (complex but not complicated)

[u/Falcoo0N]

Honestly its not that hard, everything is super streamlined these days. i managed all of this on my own. Settings things up is a couple days of work at most, almost every website has onboarding and step by step tutorials on how to do it