Don Quixote appears from behind the curtain up stage left--his left arm confidently and lustily on his right hip, right arm arcing gracefully over his head like half a rainbow.
There's so much going on in this response, but my favorite parts, in order of appearance:
> The tech men are frustrated because they are basically their best selves
The tech men are frustrated because of entitlement. Handed everything on a silver platter hand-delivered to them by a person of color driving a rented Toyota Prius for half of their monthly income.
> This is probably going to sound incredibly cynical, but the best advice I've heard for NYC techies is to try to date ballerinas.
Leave my goddamn ballerinas alone.
> But they retire before 30 and have to decide to either start a family or open a studio to start teaching.
Most of the people I dance with are software engineers of one kind or another. San Francisco may be somewhat unique in that regard--I wouldn't know, but most of the dancers I know both professional and retired are insanely enterprising and know how to hustle better than most of the people I know in tech.
> At that point most of the men they know are married or gay.
Most of the men I know that dance both professionally and at an amateur level do not identify as gay--some have families--with other dancers.
> So likely to be more willing to overlook the social weaknesses of tech men.
Nope. It's _impossible_ to overlook the social weaknesses of tech men.
I would argue that you need monitoring significantly sooner than 500,000 users. I guess, until then, you just use Twitter noise for monitoring? Seems like pretty bad customer experience.
If I have something in an environment that I would start to consider "production" (i.e. someone relies on my product to do something regularly), then I'd have monitoring regardless of the number of users. Even something as simple as, "Am I returning valid data from GET /"?
Vendor lock-in is an unavoidable cost of doing business. Even if you build literally everything yourself, which you shouldn't, you still have resources, processes, apis, automation, expertise amassed around a specific set of operating constraints.
Not only that, but if you invest significantly in any single technology, migrating to another technology is always going to be an extreme effort. Having led migrations from datacenters to AWS, AWS to Digital Ocean, RabbitMQ to NSQ to SNS+SQS, etc., I can say at this point that I do not believe in vendor lock-in as a legitimate reason to disqualify any particular solution.