I was the only technical employee at a SaaS company for years. I made the mistake of building on Rackspace’s OpenStack Cloud. Their managed MySQL database would

I was the only technical employee at a SaaS company for years. I made the mistake of building on Rackspace’s OpenStack Cloud. Their managed MySQL database would crash, seemingly randomly, about 4x/yr for 1+ hour. Pingdom alerts ruled my life. I actually bought a satellite phone that could receive the alerts for when I was on vacation (I tend to vacation in places with no cell service). It really wore me down after a while. To the point where we decided to migrate to AWS. We’ve been using Aurora ever since and have had exactly 1 instance of DB related downtime, and it was because of DNS (it’s always DNS). My life has considerably improved and I no longer have PTSD for the Pingdom sound at 4 AM. My advice? Choose your infra wisely.