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Comment by mattbillenstein | Hacker News Reader

I'd almost always rather build something than use a 3rd party service.

I understand it, I run it, and I don't have to deal with 3rd party's changes, performance problems, or downtime. Also, less bugs related to data consistency.

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Is this really an unpopular opinion? I would think most developers would rather develop a solution themselves than rely on a third party library or solution. The problem is speed and cost will never be in favor of a homegrown solution.

In some smaller startups I've been in, they seem allergic to building anything they can just buy and call via an api despite the problems that might cause - it's another level of tech debt imo.

Big non tech companies too. Building means maintenance and potentially specialised skillsets

Everything? Write your own distributed database? I'd much rather use opensource.

No, I mean I'd rather build tooling to run Postgres than use a 3rd party service to run it for me.

What about running your own db instance in a cloud VM? Do you really want to do all the infra management? I've done it and it isn't fun--well it can be making soup-to-nuts IaC recipies, but I wouldn't say it was a good use of my dev/ops working hours.

I think it's not that hard - I have configs and I even build Postgres from source so I can get the same version in dev environments supporting Linux and MacOS.

In production I find it a bit easier to profile what's happening if the db is performing poorly since I can login to the box and use standard tools - is it cpu/io bound, etc.

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