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> I'd argue self-hosting is the right choice for basically everyone, with the few exceptions at both ends of the extreme: > If you're just starting out in soft

• convolvatron 10mo ago
  its not. I've been in a few shops that use RDS because they think their time is better spend doing other things. except now they are stuck trying to maintain and debug Postgres without having the same visibility and agency that they would if they hosted it themselves. situation isn't at all clear.
  • molf 10mo ago
    Interesting. Is this an issue with RDS? I use Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and it's been rock solid. No issues; troubleshooting works fine; all extensions we need already installed; can adjust settings where needed.
    • convolvatron 10mo ago
      its more of a general condition - its not that RDS is somehow really faulty, its just that when things do go wrong, its not really anybody's job to introspect the system because RDS is taking care of it for us. in the limit I dont think we should need DBAs, but as long as we need to manage indices by hand, think more than 10 seconds about the hot queries, manage replication, tune the vacuumer, track updates, and all the other rot - then actually installing PG on a node of your choice is really the smallest of problems you face.
  • Nextgrid 10mo ago
    One thing unaccounted for if you've only ever used cloud-hosted DBs is just how slow they are compared to a modern server with NVME storage. This leads the developers to do all kinds of workarounds and reach for more cloud services (and then integrating them and - often poorly - ensuring consistency across them) because the cloud hosted DB is not able to handle the load. On bare-metal, you can go a very long way with just throwing everything at Postgres and calling it a day.
    • NewJazz 10mo ago
      Yeah our cloud DBs all have abysmal performance and high recurring cost even compared to metal we didn't even buy for hosting DBs.
    • briHass 10mo ago
      This is the reason I manage SQL Server on a VM in Azure instead of their PaaS offering. The fully managed SQL has terrible performance unless you drop many thousands a month. The VM I built is closer to 700 a month. Running on IaaS also gives you more scalability knobs to tweak: SSD Iops and b/w, multiple drives for logs/partitions, memory optimized VMs, and there's a lot of low level settings that aren't accessible in managed SQL. Licensing costs are also horrible with managed SQL Server, where it seems like you pay the Enterprise level, but running it yourself offers lower cost editions like Standard or Web.
    • andersmurphy 10mo ago
      100% this directly connected nvme is a massive win. Often several orders of magnitude. You can take it even further in some context if you use sqlite. I think one of the craziest ideas of the cloud decade was to move storage away from compute. It's even worse with things like AWS lambda or vercel. Now vercel et al are charging you extra to have your data next to your compute. We're basically back to VMs at 100-1000x the cost.
• Nextgrid 10mo ago
  > employing engineers to manage self-hosted databases is more cost effective than outsourcing Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers to deal with its complexity. The "cloud" reducing staff costs is and was always a lie. PaaS platforms (Heroku, Render, Railway) can legitimately be operated by your average dev and not have to hire a dedicated person; those cost even more though. Another limitation of both the cloud and PaaS is that they are only responsible for the infrastructure/services you use; they will not touch your application at all. Can your application automatically recover from a slow/intermittent network, a DB failover (that you can't even test because your cloud providers' failover and failure modes are a black box), and so on? Otherwise you're waking up at 3am no matter what.
  • matthewmacleod 10mo ago
    I don’t think it’s a lie, it’s just perhaps overstated. The number of staff needed to manage a cloud infrastructure is definitely lower than that required to manage the equivalent self-hosted infrastructure. Whether or not you need that equivalence is an orthogonal question.
    • Nextgrid 10mo ago
      > The number of staff needed to manage a cloud infrastructure is definitely lower than that required to manage the equivalent self-hosted infrastructure. There's probably a sweet spot where that is true, but because cloud providers offer more complexity (self-inflicted problems) and use PR to encourage you to use them ("best practices" and so on) in all the cloud-hosted shops I've been in a decade of experience I've always seen multiple full-time infra people being busy with... something? There was always something to do, whether to keep up with cloud provider changes/deprecations, implementing the latest "best practice", debugging distributed systems failures or self-inflicted problems and so on. I'm sure career/resume polishing incentives are at play here too - the employee wants the system to require their input otherwise their job is no longer needed. Maybe in a perfect world you can indeed use cloud-hosted services to reduce/eliminate dedicated staff, but in practice I've never seen anything but solo founders actually achieve that.
• cardanome 10mo ago
  You are missing that most services don't have high availability needs and don't need to scale. Most projects I have worked on in my career have never seen more than a hundred concurrent users. If something goes down on Saturday, I am going to fix it on Monday. I have worked on internal tools were I just added a postgres DB to the docker setup and that was it. 5 Minute of work and no issues at all. Sure if you have something customer facing, you need to do a bit more and setup a good backup strategy but that really isn't magic.
• emseetech 10mo ago
  | self hosting costs you between 30 and 120 minutes per month Can we honestly say that cloud services taking a half hour to two hours a month of someone's time on average is completely unheard of?
  • esseph 10mo ago
    Very much depends on what you're doing in the cloud, how many services you are using, and how frequently those services and your app needs updates.
  • SatvikBeri 10mo ago
    I handle our company's RDS instances, and probably spend closer to 2 hours a year than 2 hours a month over the last 8 years. It's definitely expensive, but it's not time-consuming.
    • emseetech 10mo ago
      Of course. But people also have high uptime servers with long-running processes they barely touch.
• anal_reactor 10mo ago
  The discussion isn't "what is more effective". The discussion is "who wants to be blamed in case things go south". If you push the decision to move to self-hosted and then one of the engineers fucks up the database, you have a serious problem. If same engineer fucks up cloud database, it's easier to save your own ass.
• fhcuvyxu 10mo ago
  Self hosting does not cost you that much at all. It's basically zero once you've got backups automated.
• npn 10mo ago
  I also encourage people to just use managed databases. After all, it is easy to replace such people. Heck actually you can fire all of them and replace the demand with genAI nowadays.
• lucideer 10mo ago
  > at a company that has reached the scale where employing engineers to manage self-hosted databases is more cost effective than outsourcing. This is the crux of one of the most common fallacies in software engineering decision making today. I've participated in a bunch of architecture / vendor evaluations that concluded managed services are more cost effective almost purely because they underestimated (or even discarded entirely) the internal engineering cost of vendor management. Black box debugging is one of the most time costuming engineering pursuits, & even when it's something widely documented & well supported like RDS, it's only really tuned for the lowest common denominator - the complexities of tuning someone else's system at scale can really add up to only marginally less effort than self-hosting (if there's any difference at all). But most importantly - even if it's significantly less effort than self-hosting, it's never effectively costed when evaluating trade-offs - that's what leads to this persistent myth about the engineering cost of self-hosting. "Managing" managed services is a non-zero cost. Add to that the ultimate trade-off of accountability vs availability (internal engineers care less about availability when it's out of there hands - but it's still a loss to your product either way).
  • bastawhiz 10mo ago
    > Black box debugging is one of the most time costuming engineering pursuits, & even when it's something widely documented & well supported like RDS, it's only really tuned for the lowest common denominator - the complexities of tuning someone else's system at scale can really add up to only marginally less effort than self-hosting (if there's any difference at all). I'm really not sure what you're talking about here. I manage many RDS clusters at work. I think in total, we've spent maybe eight hours over the last three years "tuning" the system. It runs at about 100kqps during peak load. Could it be cheaper or faster? Probably, but it's a small fraction of our total infra spend and it's not keeping me up at night. Virtually all the effort we've ever put in here has been making the application query the appropriate indexes. But you'd do no matter how you host your database. Hell, even the metrics that RDS gives you for free make the thing pay for itself, IMO. The thought of setting up grafana to monitor a new database makes me sweat.
    • solatic 10mo ago
• arevno 10mo ago
  > trading an hour or two of my time pacman -S postgresql initdb -D /pathto/pgroot/data grok/claude/gpt: "Write a concise Bash script for setting up an automated daily PostgreSQL database backup using pg_dump and cron on a Linux server, with error handling via logging and 7-day retention by deleting older backups." ctrl+c / ctrl+v Yeah that definitely took me an hour or two.
  • solatic 10mo ago
    So your backups are written to the same disk? > datacenter goes up in flames > 3-2-1 backups: 3 copies on 2 different types of media with at least 1 copy off-site. No off-site copy. Whoops!
• jrochkind1 10mo ago
  Agreed. As someone in a very tiny shop, all us devs want to do as little context switching to ops as possible. Not even half a day a month. Our hosted services are in aggregate still way cheaper than hiring another person. (We do not employ an "infrastructure engineer").