[dsgrillo]

> Don't: manage your own DBs for production. [...]

Why, though?

If you're really on a low budget, the extra $$ for a managed DB doesn't really pay for itself. I'd rather prefer spinning up a container running whatever DB I need and run daily backups to an external vendor.

In my case, the website is free, living on ads revenue, so every penny counts.

[throwaway2016a]

Good question and I have an answer for you. It depends on your risk tolerance and resiliency.

If you compare it to a single machine with multiple tenants and no replication, it doesn't make sense. But that comes with risks and given the OPs question in the context of a k8s cluster (which for HA is a minimum of 5 servers), I figured they are prioritizing time savings over money.

Losing customer data, downtime, and data breaches can kill some companies before they even take off.

If your particular business is not sensitive to that than you can run your own database. Or better yet, if you're a content business you may not even need a database at all.

But even so, if you run your own DB you need to worry about backups and such so it may even still be worth the money. And if you are going for High Availability (HA), running a properly replicated cluster can be time consuming.

The cost of a t3.medium RDS instance on AWS for instance is $0.068 / hour compared to a t3.medium instance on EC2 is $0.0416 per hour. That is an extra $19 per month. For my use case, paying an extra $19 a month is well worth the savings in time and the piece of mind I have knowing my backups are running and if the server crashes I can recover quickly. But you must consider use cases and your's might be different.

[dsgrillo]

You bring up good points, fair enough.

I might being naive here, still:

   - losing customer data: the backup must be done frequently enough. So I'm not risking losing data.
   - downtime: I'd expect that RDS could still go south as well, maybe less frequently, but still. In my case I start another VM, run again the container and apply the backup.
   - data breaches: Of course one can misconfigure something here, but not sure how it'd be different using a managed database. 

Regarding the cost, I know that there are companies spending hundreds of $$ on their infra, but it just baffles me for most use cases. I still feel that one can get really far with just a budget of 50$/month.