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Comment by lancebeet | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little confused by this post. Obviously it's easier to maintain a plain VM than managed services. That's why people are paying a lot more money to the cloud providers for managed services, so they don't have to do it themselves. What you're saying is that this is essentially a pointless endeavor? I don't think this statement is entirely uncontroversial, since managed services are the main reason for many companies to migrate to cloud.

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Using managed services is not a pointless endeavor – they can save you a lot of time (and therefore money).

Unless you need to switch providers, at which point it may take more time to adjust for differences in how those managed services operate.

Managed services are absolutely not the main reason for moving to the cloud. Companies do it for the flexibility that comes with renting the real estate/energy/hardware instead of owning it.

We use managed services, but only those that are managed versions of pre-existing software.

For example, we'll used Managed Postgres, but not Azure or AWS's home grown databases.

Makes migrating much easier.

Heh, until you need to rollback a specific table in postgres using their backup solution. IIRC, this is possible in AWS -- or at least, I'm 99% sure you can at least download the backup. In Azure? All you can do is restore the entire database, and you cannot download it.

You can def download it

Not in my azure portal.

>> You can def download it

I would love for you to briefly describe how and where this can be done. I wasted a significant amount of time searching for this exact capability for Azure SQL Database and only ran into dead-ends.

For Azure SQL Database, you can restore any database backup to a new database, and export any existing database to bacpac format on a storage account [0]. The storage account file can be downloaded. You can also do the latter without using through the portal, using sqlpackage.exe on your local machine (same restriction applies: sqlpackage must connect to a live database, so if you want to download/view an Azure backup you must first perform a backup restore).

Not sure how to do the same for Azure Postgresql databases, but looks like standard pg_dump and pg_restore are supported.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/d...

Yes! The longer response is that the closer you stick to standards the easier of a time you will have. VMs are a standard with cloud-init and image formats, etc.

i.e. in 2025 managed Kubernetes is not _that_ different between providers

I mean, if it was solely about renting machines, we’d all just use DigitalOcean, or EC2 on AWS.

People use things like RDS and EKS/GKE to avoid all the administrative overhead that comes with running these things in prod. The database or its underlying hardware has a problem at 1am? It’s Amazon engineers getting paged, not you (hopefully… assuming the fault hasnt materialised to operational impact yet)

I've never seen a managed IaaS that saved time. It is marketed as something that can free you from hiring ops people, but you will absolutely need to hire some supplier relations people to deal with it. (And contract optimizers, and internal PR to deal with the fallout.)

It's different for fully featured SaaS. It's a matter of the abstracted complexity vs. interface complexity ratio that is so common for everything you do in software.

It's easier for the provider to maintain a VM provision. It's supposed to be easier for the customer to maintain managed services, but that's often debatable.

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