Or CDN, queues, log service, observability, distributed storage. I am not even sure what the people in the on-prem vs cloud argument think. If you need a highly specialised infra with one or two core services and a lower tier network is ok then on-prem is ok. Otherwise if is a never ending quest to re-discover the millions of engineering hours went into building something like AWS.
Is it though? This is a genuine question. My intuition is that the investment of time / stress / risk to become good at this is unlikely to have high ROI to either the person putting in that time or to the business paying them to do so. But maybe that's not right.
It's more nuanced for sure than my pithy comment suggests. I've done both self-managed and managed and felt it was a good use of my time to self-manage given the size of the organizations, the profile of the workloads and the cost differential. There is a whole universe of technology businesses that do not earn SV/FAANG levels of ROI - for them, self-managed is a reasonable allocation of effort.
One point to keep in mind is that the effort is not constant. Once you reach a certain level of competency and stability in your setup, there is not much difference in time spent.
I also felt that self-managed gave us more flexibility in terms of tuning.
My final point is that any investment in databases whether as a developer or as an ops person is long-lived and will pay dividends for a longer time than almost all other technologies.
Managing the PostgreSQL databases is a medium to low complexity task as I see it.
Take two equivalent machines, set up with streaming replication exactly as described in the documentation, add Bacula for backups to an off-site location for point-in-time recovery.
We haven't felt the need to set up auto fail-over to the hot spare; that would take some extra effort (and is included with AWS equivalents?) but nothing I'd be scared of.
Add monitoring that the DB servers are working, replication is up-to-date and the backups are working.
I really do not think so. Most startups should rather focus on their core competency and direct engineering resources to their edge. When you are $100 mln ARR then feel free to mess around with whatever db setup you want.
Or CDN, queues, log service, observability, distributed storage. I am not even sure what the people in the on-prem vs cloud argument think. If you need a highly specialised infra with one or two core services and a lower tier network is ok then on-prem is ok. Otherwise if is a never ending quest to re-discover the millions of engineering hours went into building something like AWS.
It's worth becoming good at.
Is it though? This is a genuine question. My intuition is that the investment of time / stress / risk to become good at this is unlikely to have high ROI to either the person putting in that time or to the business paying them to do so. But maybe that's not right.
It's more nuanced for sure than my pithy comment suggests. I've done both self-managed and managed and felt it was a good use of my time to self-manage given the size of the organizations, the profile of the workloads and the cost differential. There is a whole universe of technology businesses that do not earn SV/FAANG levels of ROI - for them, self-managed is a reasonable allocation of effort.
One point to keep in mind is that the effort is not constant. Once you reach a certain level of competency and stability in your setup, there is not much difference in time spent. I also felt that self-managed gave us more flexibility in terms of tuning.
My final point is that any investment in databases whether as a developer or as an ops person is long-lived and will pay dividends for a longer time than almost all other technologies.
1 reply →
Managing the PostgreSQL databases is a medium to low complexity task as I see it.
Take two equivalent machines, set up with streaming replication exactly as described in the documentation, add Bacula for backups to an off-site location for point-in-time recovery.
We haven't felt the need to set up auto fail-over to the hot spare; that would take some extra effort (and is included with AWS equivalents?) but nothing I'd be scared of.
Add monitoring that the DB servers are working, replication is up-to-date and the backups are working.
11 replies →
I really do not think so. Most startups should rather focus on their core competency and direct engineering resources to their edge. When you are $100 mln ARR then feel free to mess around with whatever db setup you want.