[objektif]

No amount of money will make me maintain my own dbs. We tried it at first and it was a nightmare.

[g8oz]

It's worth becoming good at.

[sanderjd]

Is it though? This is a genuine question. My intuition is that the investment of time / stress / risk to become good at this is unlikely to have high ROI to either the person putting in that time or to the business paying them to do so. But maybe that's not right.

[objektif]

I really do not think so. Most startups should rather focus on their core competency and direct engineering resources to their edge. When you are $100 mln ARR then feel free to mess around with whatever db setup you want.

[dev_l1x_be]

Or CDN, queues, log service, observability, distributed storage. I am not even sure what the people in the on-prem vs cloud argument think. If you need a highly specialised infra with one or two core services and a lower tier network is ok then on-prem is ok. Otherwise if is a never ending quest to re-discover the millions of engineering hours went into building something like AWS.