[jaza]

You don't pay for RDS because you care about IOPS. You pay for it because you want backups and replication to be somebody else's problem. And because you (by which I mean probably the MBA management above you, rather than you yourself) care about it being an opex rather than capex cost, a lot more than you care about how much the cost is. And because ISO audit boxes get ticked.

[thyristan]

If you want your own hardware to be OPEX, just do leasing. Every enterprise hardware seller will make you an offer for that.

[benjiro]

> You pay for it because you want backups and replication to be somebody else's problem.

Or you just use something like CockroachDB, YugabyteDB etc that auto replicate, auto rebalance if a node goes down, and have build in support for backups to and from S3...

Or if your a bit more hands on, multigress seems to be closing to completion ( https://github.com/multigres/multigres ) from the guy that make Vitess for Mysql.

The idea that managing hardware and software is hard, is silly yet, people (mostly managers it seems ) think its the best solution.

[manacit]

I wouldn't say it's closing to completion - it looks like it's in the very early stages development according to their repo. I don't see any evidence they've gotten as far as even running a single query through it.

Even when it's done, it's going to be a lot of work to run. sure, it's not guaranteed to be hard, but if it's not your core business and you're making money, having someone else do it gives you time to focus on what matters.