GitHub's listed as an example, but I don't really think we should be. It was pretty reasonable for us to start on virtualized instances to start out. By the time we moved to bare metal, we had grown quite a bit and it was pretty clear what our growth strategy for the future was. To further complicate things, how we stored our Git repositories on the backend changed dramatically during the move from virtualized to bare metal... a good move, to be certain, but one that took considerable up-front development time, and one that may have sunk the company had it delayed GitHub's launch by six months or more.
We're also just a weird case, since our bottlenecks are almost always a matter of IO and how-fast-can-we-access disk. That makes our use case a little more difficult to virtualize. I don't think this is something most startups generally experience, at least not to our extent.
We're also just a weird case, since our bottlenecks are almost always a matter of IO and how-fast-can-we-access disk. That makes our use case a little more difficult to virtualize. I don't think this is something most startups generally experience, at least not to our extent.