Spent 6 hours last night in research mode, set on answering the time-sensitive question “what is the ideal stack for a SaaS product startup given current latest cloud provider tech”. The question has implicit constraints of time and scalability whose values must be balanced between enabling developers to build / ship high quality product iteratively fast and materializing the scalability benefits (highly available and responsive platform) of a well-defined K8s-orchestrated cloud architecture.

These 2 elements of application developer friendliness without compromise on scalability (cloud) are the critical product development tenets for a SaaS startup to survive the early stage transition from prototype (handful of users) to MVP (spike in user adoption).

My findings are summarized below and should be considered unreliable after 3 months, so hurry up. Such is Smoore’s Law (SaaS + Moore’s) that the leading tech stack for startups completely changes every 6 months.