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Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

Revenue is irrelevant.

They need a database server/cluster. Aws provide one, other places can host one cheaper.

Less money spent is less money spent regardless of your revenue.

Also, this strawman of “you can’t save money outside aws, you need someone to manage your racks” is beyond ridiculous.

If virtual machines work for you in aws, they’ll work for you elsewhere, and there are fucking thousands of companies who will rent you virtual machines for a fraction of what aws charges.

Ok, so yes you need someone to look after those servers. So? Are you seriously suggesting it’s wise to use AWS provided infrastructure without someone to look after it?

Anyone who says “aws means we don’t need ops” has no fucking clue what they’re talking about.

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What are these places with cheaper aws-rds ?

RDS is a database service. I said you can host a database cluster of your own at other providers for less money, not that other places have a literal RDS clone.

You'll have to know how to setup and maintain your own database infrastructure, though, right? I'm not an infrastructure engineer, but patching, security, OS updates, database software updates, being able to quickly redeploy in case of failure, redundancy, etc.

I've read horror stories about the poor engineers at AWS who are on call and have to detail with physical pagers paging them at various hours of the night. Systems fail, dependencies fail, shit happens... So now you will need to hire some small team to do these things for you.

I'm not saying you never need to be concerned with any of these things if you're on Azure or AWS.

I am saying that you need to factor in these components into your costs.

Infrastructure management might not be a core competency at my company. That's why I pay some premium but hand it off to the Azures and AWS's of the world.

Is hosting your own database cluster at some other company for a smaller monthly fee actually saving you money each month? What are the other costs to your business from making the move?

The answer could be yes, it's cheaper and makes 100% business sense. All I'm saying is these questions have to be asked, investigated and concluded. Arguing on one side or another without going through these steps is shortsighted.

Unless you're running something particularly esoteric (which means you aren't used RDS anyway), software updates will come from either your distro's packages if you use them, or the vendors packages (e.g. mysql, percona, mariadb, whichever flavour of postgres, etc). So updates are straightforward, regular maintenance, not that different from any other Linux server. Who maintains the servers that your app/site runs on?

Security is basic OS security, and then DB specific security, which is IMO easier to deal with than AWS security.

Your infrastructure setup should be repeatable, regardless of whether you use AWS or a bunch of old laptops in a closet. This can be anything from shell scripts to your own custom apt repo and private packages - so if you need to 'redeploy' because you don't have a HA failover (I dunno, maybe you like to live dangerously?) you re-run the setup process on a new cluster, and import the last backup you have.

Sure, for some organisations AWS may be the best case scenario, but I've yet to see one where it actually is. More likely, is organisations that somehow believe AWS means "I dont need ops" because a developer with zero ops capabilities/experience clicks some 'create instance' buttons, and follows a web tutorial on 'how to run your site on AWS'.

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