Developer Spotlight

“The most painful DevOps mistakes I’ve experienced were rooted in over-engineering.”

Craig Spaeth has led engineering at three healthcare startups, and he’s used Aptible at all of them. Here’s what he’s learned 👇

At his latest company, Kismet Health Inc, Craig is helping build a modern care platform that empowers health professionals to provide holistic mental health care through advanced data, automation, and AI.

From scaling infra to meeting compliance requirements, Craig’s teams have faced the challenges every health tech startup hits.

The takeaways:

1. Don’t over-engineer too early ❌
Startups often introduce unnecessary complexity—especially by adopting microservices before they’re ready. Craig believes teams should squeeze more value out of their monoliths first.

“Microservices solve one problem: scaling dev/ops staff. I believe it’s only appropriate after reaching staff sizes of the hundreds if not thousands.”


2. Invest in simple improvements instead 👍
You can achieve a lot without overhauling your stack. Craig recommends small, high-leverage upgrades like faster builds, smarter indexes, caching, and better modularization.

“These organizations could have saved a lot of time and resources with simpler incremental improvements to their monolith.”


3. Use a PaaS—don’t hire DevOps too soon ⏰
For most early-stage teams, platforms like Aptible cover what you need without the headcount. They give engineers autonomy while keeping things compliant.

“PaaS like Aptible can meet the scaling needs of 90% of organizations and often eliminates the need to ever staff a dedicated DevOps department.”


4. Healthcare tech isn’t as novel as it seems 🩺
Yes, there’s a learning curve, but the technical challenges are often similar to other industries. The biggest hurdle is understanding the domain and navigating compliance.

“The technical work involved in EHR/EMR integrations is not dissimilar to integrating any legacy monolithic vendor.”


5. Buy early, then replace when the time is right 🔁
Startups shouldn’t try to build everything on day one. Craig advises buying solutions to move fast, but being ready to outgrow and replace them when it makes sense.

“Bias towards buying solutions early, but don’t be afraid to quickly replace something with an in-house solution when the time is right.”