← Back to context

Comment by cheema33

11 hours ago

> Managing the PostgreSQL databases is a medium to low complexity task as I see it.

Same here. But, I assume you have managed PostgreSQL in the past. I have. There are a large number of people software devs who have not. For them, it is not a low complexity task. And I can understand that.

I am a software dev for our small org and I run the servers and services we need. I use ansible and terraform to automate as much as I can. And recently I have added LLMs to the mix. If something goes wrong, I ask Claude to use the ansible and terraform skills that I created for it, to find out what is going on. It is surprisingly good at this. Similarly I use LLMs to create new services or change configuration on existing ones. I review the changes before they are applied, but this process greatly simplifies service management.

7 comments

cheema33

Reply
Dylan16807  9 hours ago

> Same here. But, I assume you have managed PostgreSQL in the past. I have. There are a large number of people software devs who have not. For them, it is not a low complexity task. And I can understand that.

I'd say needing to read the documentation for the first time is what bumps it up from low complexity to medium. And then at medium you should still do it if there's a significant cost difference.

sanderjd  10 hours ago

For what it's worth, I have also managed my own databases, but that's exactly why I don't think it's a good use of my time. Because it does take time! And managed database options are abundant, inexpensive, and perform well. So I just don't really see the appeal of putting time into this.

  • mattbillenstein  8 hours ago

    If you have a database, you still have work to do - optimizing, understanding indexes, etc. Managed services don't solve these problems for you magically and once you do them, just running the db itself isn't such a big deal and it's probably easier to tune for what you want to do.

    • sanderjd  8 hours ago

      Absolutely yes. But you have to do this either way. So it's just purely additive work to run the infrastructure as well.

      I think if it were true that the tuning is easier if you run the infrastructure yourself, then this would be a good point. But in my experience, this isn't the case for a couple reasons. First of all, the majority of tuning wins (indexes, etc.) are not on the infrastructure side, so it's not a big win to run it yourself. But then also, the professionals working at a managed DB vendor are better at doing the kind of tuning that is useful on the infra side.

      1 reply →