Every company beyond a particular size surely? For many small and medium sized companies hiring an infrastructure team makes just as little sense as hiring kitchen staff to make lunch.
For medium sized companies you need "devops engineers". And in all honesty, more than you'd need sysadmins for the same deployment.
For large companies, they split up AWS responsibilities into entire departments of teams (for example, all clouds have math auth so damn difficult most large companies have -not 1- but multiple departments just dealing with authorization, before you so much as start your first app)
Local reproducibility is easier, and performance is often much better
As I pointed out above, you may be better served mixing and matching so you spend your time on the critical aspects but offload those other tasks to someone else.
Of course, I’m not sitting at your computer so I can’t tell you what’s right for you.
Task runner/que at least for us postgres works for both cases.
We also self host an s3 storage and allow useruploaded content in within strict borders.
Fact is a lot of these companies are on the cloud because their internal IT was a total fail.
Of course, my comment wasn't aimed at those who successfully keep their cloud bill in the low 3-figures, but the majority of companies with a 5-figure bill and multiple "infrastructure" people on payroll futzing around with YAML files. Even half the achieved savings should be enough incentive for those guys to learn something new.
But initial setup is maybe 10% of the story. The day 2 operations of monitoring, backups, scaling, and failover still needs to happen, and it still requires expertise.
If you bring that expertise in house, it costs much more than 10x ($3/day -> $30/day = $10,950/year).
If you get the expertise from experts who are juggling you along with a lot of other clients, you get something like PlanetScale or CrunchyData, which are also significantly more expensive.
Most monitoring solutions support Postgres and don't actually care where your DB is hosted. Of course this only applies if someone was actually looking at the metrics to begin with.
> backups
Plenty of options to choose from depending on your recovery time objective. From scheduled pg_dumps to WAL shipping to disk snapshots and a combination of them at any schedule you desire. Just ship them to your favorite blob storage provider and call it a day.
> scaling
That's the main reason I favor bare-metal infrastructure. There is no way anything on the cloud (at a price you can afford) can rival the performance of even a mid-range server that scaling is effectively never an issue; if you're outgrowing that, the conversation we're having is not about getting a big DB but using multiple DBs and sharding at the application layer.
> failover still needs to happen
Yes, get another server and use Patroni/etc. Or just accept the occasional downtime and up to 15 mins of data loss if the machine never comes back up. You'd be surprised how many businesses are perfectly fine with this. Case in point: two major clouds had hour-long downtimes recently and everyone basically forgot about it a week later.
> If you bring that expertise in house
Infrastructure should not require continuous upkeep/repair. You wouldn't buy a car that requires you to have a full-time mechanic in the passenger seat at all times. If your infrastructure requires this, you should ask for a refund and buy from someone who sells more reliable infra.
A server will run forever once set up unless hardware fails (and some hardware can be redundant with spares provisioned ahead of time to automatically take over and delay maintenance operations). You should spend a couple hours a month max on routine maintenance which can be outsourced and still beats the cloud price.
I think you're underestimating the amount of tech that is essentially nix machines all around you that somehow just... work* despite having zero upkeep or maintenance. Modern hardware is surprisingly reliable and most outages are caused by operator error when people are (potentially unnecessarily) messing with stuff rather than the hardware failing.
An LLM could set this up for you, it's dead simple.
I also disagree that the ongoing maintenance, observability, and testing of a replicated database would take a few hours to set up and then require zero maintenance and never ping me with alerts.
Looking at all the recent AWS, Azure and Cloudflare outages, I posit that it doesn't.
At my last two places it very quickly got to the point where the technical complexity of deployments, managing environments, dealing with large piles of data, etc. meant that we needed to hire someone to deal with it all.
They actually preferred managing VMs and self hosting in many cases (we kept the cloud web hosting for features like deploy previews, but that’s about it) to dealing with proprietary cloud tooling and APIs. Saved a ton of money, too.
On the other hand, the place before that was simple enough to build and deploy using cloud solutions without hiring someone dedicated (up to at least some pretty substantial scale that we didn’t hit).