[aerhardt]

Hetzner doesn't even have an RDS service. I've heard rumors for years but they haven't done it. Also, while I agree that leaning too much on the cloud leads to lock-in - this is an abstract concept that needs to be guarded against when managing technology, always, anyway - and vendor-driven hellish architectures, "vanilla cloud" offers other conveniences other than compute, bucket, storage managed and load balancers, like IAM, good CLIs, secrets management, etc. Only Scaleway or OVH seem to be timidly developing what I would consider "vanilla cloud".

[bborud]

Here’s a key question most people don’t actually ask: do you need RDS? If you’re on AWS the answer is fairly simple because it boils down to what IO capacity you are willing to pay for. Decent performance will cost you so you might as well pay the premium and have AWS manage it too.

But if you have bare metal with fast disk drives, everything changes. You can get decent performance at a lower price in exchange for taking on a bit more responsibility. So then the question becomes how much of a burden it is to manage what is essentially just another application.

AWS doesn’t just rent computers, it rents relief from responsibility, and prices raw performance to make that trade feel inevitable.

Most people do not operate services that cannot bear very occasional downtime. But they have been conditioned to think they do. Or to not consider other factors that influence their actual downtime.

For instance: we ran a service that in itself achieved 99.99% uptime (allowing about 52 minutes of downtime per year). We even survived a big AWS outage that took out almost everyone else because we had as much redundancy as we could afford. However, the service depended completely on a system totally outside our control that would, on average have multiple outages every day (well usually at night, but not always). Ranging from 30 second blips to an hour. Meaning that the customers would have to deal with this anyway. No matter how stable our systems were.

And yet, for years we obsessed about uptime needlessly. Our customers didn’t care. They had to deal with the unreliability of the upstream system anyway. It didn’t cost us that much money, but it did make everything more complex.

Now, back to the question: do you need RDS? When was the last time you set up and ran Postgres? When was the last time you set up replication and live backups? How hard was it the first time? How hard was it to repeat after doing it once?

If you are already on bare metal servers you may want to at least try to set up Postgres a few times and track cost in terms of time, money and complexity. Because if you use RDS, chances are it isn’t the only thing you are managing in the cloud.