Comment by Nextgrid
4 days ago
If they just paid half of the markup they currently pay for the cloud I'm sure they'll be swimming in qualified candidates.
4 days ago
If they just paid half of the markup they currently pay for the cloud I'm sure they'll be swimming in qualified candidates.
Our AWS spend is something like $160/month. Want to come build bare metal database infrastructure for us for $3/day?
When you need to scale up and don't want that $160 to increase 10x to handle the additional load the numbers start making more sense: 3 month's worth of the projected increase upfront is around 4.3k, which is good money for a few days' work for the setup/migration and remains a good deal for you since you break even after 3 months and keep on pocketing the savings indefinitely from that point on.
Of course, my comment wasn't aimed at those who successfully keep their cloud bill in the low 3-figures, but the majority of companies with a 5-figure bill and multiple "infrastructure" people on payroll futzing around with YAML files. Even half the achieved savings should be enough incentive for those guys to learn something new.
> few days' work
But initial setup is maybe 10% of the story. The day 2 operations of monitoring, backups, scaling, and failover still needs to happen, and it still requires expertise.
If you bring that expertise in house, it costs much more than 10x ($3/day -> $30/day = $10,950/year).
If you get the expertise from experts who are juggling you along with a lot of other clients, you get something like PlanetScale or CrunchyData, which are also significantly more expensive.
1 reply →
At 160/mo you are using so little you might as well host off of a raspberry pi on your desk with a USB3 SSD attached. Maintenance and keeping a hot backup would take a few hours to set up, and you're more flexible too. And if you need to scale, rent a VPS or even dedicated machine from Hetzner.
An LLM could set this up for you, it's dead simple.
I'm not going to put customer data on a USB-3 SSD sitting on my desk. Having a small database doesn't mean you can ignore physical security and regulatory compliance, particularly if you've still got reasonable cash flow. Just as one example, some of our regulatory requirements involve immutable storage - how am I supposed to make an SSD that's literally on my desk immutable in any meaningful way? S3 handles this in seconds. Same thing with geographically distributed replicas and backups.
I also disagree that the ongoing maintenance, observability, and testing of a replicated database would take a few hours to set up and then require zero maintenance and never ping me with alerts.
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Nice troll. But TFA is about corporate IT so hopefully you get whatever.
For companies not heavily into tech, lots of this stuff is not that expensive. Again, how many DBAs are even looking for a 3 hr/month sidegig?