Operating infrastructure responsibly is not a skill a lot of developers have and very different from just using infrastructure that is managed for you. I've se

Operating infrastructure responsibly is not a skill a lot of developers have and very different from just using infrastructure that is managed for you. I've seen what proper ops teams look like and if you can afford one they are a great asset. 24x7 uptime with five nines is a bit of a myth in our industry. But if you are honest about what that means, it means that you need people with a clue available at any point that you can rely on to be there and to be skilled ready to fix your system when it needs fixing. That's effectively what you pay for with managed services. You'll get a nice resilient setup, backups, monitoring, and support from their expert ops team to help you with whatever. Most small companies are just faking being very dependable and end up spending more on preventable outages and figuring out all sorts of weird shit than they save by self-hosting. I see startups wasting a lot of time on all sorts of silly things that are clearly far out of their comfort zone. Hosted infrastructure is cheap and dependable these days. Unless you can compete with that level of dependability, you should not be self hosting anything. The cost savings rarely add up to being meaningful. The expenses on the other hand are very substantial if you stop and think about it and acknowledge that the per hour cost of your developers quickly adds up to whatever you might actually spend on managed services. Most teams I've worked with spend more on a single developer per month than on their cloud hosting. That's how it should be. Once your bills hit tens of thousands per month, you might want to look at optimizing some of that. But before that, have your developers focus on developing rather than trying to be an amateur ops team. I actually do a lot of consulting related to Elasticsearch and I have dealt with some pretty hairy and misguided setups. By the time they talk to me, they've already wasted a lot of time, money and effort. Most teams I deal with have one or two people that know only a little bit about Elasticsearch. Enough to use it and benefit from it but then they still need me to tell them how to use it properly. So, clearly not enough to operate it responsibly. Even if I come in for just a few days, they'll spend more on me than years of hosting with Elastic Cloud would cost them.