We all know Tech Debt is a bad thing but is there a time and place to take on Tech Debt?

I ask because I recently did. I had a decision to make, a business decision more so than a tech decision.

As Schematical and Cloud War Games scale up from a business side with me bringing on more team members to grow the business I needed a way for us to be able to launch landing pages faster and iterate on those pages.

For this we wired in Payload CMS, unfortunately that quadrupled our Lambda’s cold boot time.

This means if you come to the website and no one has been there for a while it will take 4x longer for the page to load. Every page load after that for the next 10-15 minutes will be plenty fast but that first load is brutal; at least to my eyes as a guy that goes around the internet boasting he can make your site faster.

So why would I allow this to happen? I had to make a decision: Would making 1 page load out of 100 slower be more costly then hand cuffing my team from pushing out new valuable content and landing pages for our growing audience?

I considered the factors:

Will anyone notice this but me? Possibly, but to most it might just appear like a blip in the wifi. People are not coming to any of my websites 10 times per day.

Is this permanent? No, I can fix this easily by moving over to ECS which I actually was ready to do last year.

Will it cost more? Yes, but I don’t want to be that dentist with bad teeth and it’s not that much. In the end it will likely improve SEO as well.

I weighed it out in my head with the engineer/technician saying “don’t do it” and the business/content creator saying “Screw it, lets do it”.

In the end the business side won. I took on the Technical Debt for now but will likely repay it by switching to ECS in the next few weeks.

In the meantime sorry if you get the occasional slow page load.

Update: I ripped the bandage off Schematical and we are now sitting comfortably at around 100ms round trip through the ALB.

If you are interested in chatting about this or any AWS / DevOps related problems hop on Today’s Free Live Q&A at 1PM US CT.

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