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That’s just another way of saying the opportunity cost isn’t worth paying to do the migration. Optionality and flexibility are extremely valuable, and that is

That’s just another way of saying the opportunity cost isn’t worth paying to do the migration. Optionality and flexibility are extremely valuable, and that is why cloud compute continues to be popular, especially for rapidly/burstily growing businesses like startups.

latch 3y ago
I don't mean to pick on your specific comments, but I find these analysis almost always lack a crucial perspective: level of knowledge. This is the single biggest factor, and it's the hardest one to be honest about. No one wants to say "RDS is a good choice . . . because I don't know how nor have I ever self managed a database." If you want a different opportunity cost, get people with different experience. If RDS is objectively expensive, objectively slow, but subjectively easy, change the subject.
- pcl 3y ago
  > No one wants to say "RDS is a good choice . . . because I don't know how nor have I ever self managed a database." I don't think that's accurate. I've self-managed databases, and I still think that RDS is compelling for small engineering teams. There's a lot to get right when managing a database, and it's easy to screw something up. Perhaps none of the individual parts are super-complicated, but the cost of failure is high. Outsourcing that cost to AWS is pretty compelling. At a certain team size, you'll end up with a section of the team that's dedicated to these sorts of careful processes. But the first place these issues come up is with the database, and if you can put off that bit of organizational scaling until later, then that's a great path to choose.
- maccard 3y ago
  I disagree here. This falls apart when you zoom out one step. I'm perfectly capable of managing a database. I'm also capable of maintaining load balancers, redis, container orchestrators, Jenkins, perforce, grafana, Loki, Oncall, individually. But each of those has the high chance of being a distraction from what our software actually does. Its about tradeoffs, and some tradeoffs are often more applicable than others - getting a ping at 7am on a Sunday because your ec2 instance filled it's drive up with logs and your log rotation script failed because it didn't have a long enough retey is a problem I'm happy to outsource when I should be focusing on the actual app.
- theptip 3y ago
  Lack of expertise in some particular technology is simply another opportunity cost. I can learn how to operate a production DB at scale (I have racked servers and run other production workloads) but as cofounder/CTO in a startup is that the best use of my time? If the cost of a hosted DB is going to sink the company, then of course, I will figure it out and run it myself. But it’s not, for most startups. And therefore that knowledge isn’t providing much leverage. Starting an AI company with deep expertise in training models - that is an example of knowledge providing huge leverage. DB tech is not in this bucket for most businesses.
graemep 3y ago
People do not really understand the value of the former. Even dealing with financial options (buy/sell and underlying) which are a pure form of it, people either do not understand the value, or do so in a very abstract way they do not intuit.
- matwood 3y ago
  Good point. And, since you brought up financials, you also see this when people use a majority of their savings to lump sum pay off a mortgage. They take an overweighted view of saving on interest and, IMO, underweight the flexibility of liquidity.
graemep 3y ago
On the other hand cloud platforms can be hard to migrate off, which is very much taking away options.

latch 3y ago

I don't mean to pick on your specific comments, but I find these analysis almost always lack a crucial perspective: level of knowledge. This is the single biggest factor, and it's the hardest one to be honest about. No one wants to say "RDS is a good choice . . . because I don't know how nor have I ever self managed a database." If you want a different opportunity cost, get people with different experience. If RDS is objectively expensive, objectively slow, but subjectively easy, change the subject.

pcl 3y ago
> No one wants to say "RDS is a good choice . . . because I don't know how nor have I ever self managed a database." I don't think that's accurate. I've self-managed databases, and I still think that RDS is compelling for small engineering teams. There's a lot to get right when managing a database, and it's easy to screw something up. Perhaps none of the individual parts are super-complicated, but the cost of failure is high. Outsourcing that cost to AWS is pretty compelling. At a certain team size, you'll end up with a section of the team that's dedicated to these sorts of careful processes. But the first place these issues come up is with the database, and if you can put off that bit of organizational scaling until later, then that's a great path to choose.
maccard 3y ago
I disagree here. This falls apart when you zoom out one step. I'm perfectly capable of managing a database. I'm also capable of maintaining load balancers, redis, container orchestrators, Jenkins, perforce, grafana, Loki, Oncall, individually. But each of those has the high chance of being a distraction from what our software actually does. Its about tradeoffs, and some tradeoffs are often more applicable than others - getting a ping at 7am on a Sunday because your ec2 instance filled it's drive up with logs and your log rotation script failed because it didn't have a long enough retey is a problem I'm happy to outsource when I should be focusing on the actual app.
theptip 3y ago
Lack of expertise in some particular technology is simply another opportunity cost. I can learn how to operate a production DB at scale (I have racked servers and run other production workloads) but as cofounder/CTO in a startup is that the best use of my time? If the cost of a hosted DB is going to sink the company, then of course, I will figure it out and run it myself. But it’s not, for most startups. And therefore that knowledge isn’t providing much leverage. Starting an AI company with deep expertise in training models - that is an example of knowledge providing huge leverage. DB tech is not in this bucket for most businesses.

graemep 3y ago

People do not really understand the value of the former. Even dealing with financial options (buy/sell and underlying) which are a pure form of it, people either do not understand the value, or do so in a very abstract way they do not intuit.

matwood 3y ago
Good point. And, since you brought up financials, you also see this when people use a majority of their savings to lump sum pay off a mortgage. They take an overweighted view of saving on interest and, IMO, underweight the flexibility of liquidity.

graemep 3y ago

On the other hand cloud platforms can be hard to migrate off, which is very much taking away options.