In the small SaaS startup case, I’d say the production database is typically the most critical single piece of infra, so self hosting is just not a compelling proposition unless you have a strong technical reason where having super powerful database hardware is important, or a team with multiple people who have sysadmin or DBA experience. I think both of those cases are unusual.
I’ve been the guy managing a critical self-hosted database in a small team, and it’s such a distraction from focusing on the actual core product.
To me, the cost of RDS covers tons of risks and time sinks: having to document the db server setup so I’m not the only one on the team who actually knows how to operate it, setting up monitoring, foolproof backups so I don’t need to worry that they’re silently failing because a volume is full and I misconfigured the monitoring, PITR for when someone ships a bad migration, one click HA so the database itself is very unlikely to wake me at 3am, blue/green deploys to make major version upgrades totally painless, never having to think about hardware failures or borked dist-upgrades, and so on.
Each of those is ultimately either undifferentiated work to develop in-house RDS features that could have been better spent on product, or a risk of significant data loss, downtime, or firefighting. RDS looks like a pretty good deal, up to a point.
I like fiddling with databases, but I totally agree with this. Unless you really need a big database and are going to save 100k+ per year by going self managed then RDS or similar just saves you so much stress. We've been using it for the best part of 10 years and uptime and latency have consistently been excellent, and functionality is all rock solid. I never have to think about it, which is just what I want from something so core to the business.
I am good at databases (have been a DBA in the past), and 100% agree with this. RDS is easy to standup and get all the things you mentioned, and not have to think about again. If we grow to the point where the overhead is more than a FT DBA, awesome. It means we are successful, and are fortunate to have options.
Unfortunately there are so many people and teams who thinks that simply running their databases on RDS means that they're backed up, highly-available and can be easily load balanced, upgraded, partitioned, migrated and so on which is simply not the case with the basic configuration.
RDS is a great choice, for prototyping and only for production if you know what you're doing when setting it up.
FWIW, this is common in all cloud deployments, people assume that running something "severless" is a magical silver bullet.
Well…just using the defaults when creating an RDS Postgres in the console give you an HA cluster with two read replicas, 7 days of backups restorable to any point in time, automatic minor version upgrades, and very easy major upgrades. So unless you start actively unchecking stuff those are not entirely invalid assumptions.
I agree, but I also classify some of these as "learn them once and you're all set".
Maybe it takes you a month the first time around and a week the 10th time around. First product suffers, the other products not so much. Now it just takes a week of your time and does not require you to pay large AWS fees, which means you are not bleeding money
I like to set up scrappy products that do not rack up large monthly fees. This means I can let them run unprofitable for longer and I don't have to seek an investor early, which would light up a large fire under everyone's butts and start influencing timelines because now they have the money and want a return asap.
I'll launch a week later - no biggie usually. I could have come up with the idea a month later, so I'm still 3 weeks early ;)
It doesn't work for all projects, obviously, but I've seen plenty of SaaS start out with a shopping spree, then pay monthly fees and purchase licenses for stuff that they could have set up for free if they put some (usually not a lot) effort into it. When times get rough, the shorter runway becomes a hard fact of life. Maybe they wouldn't have needed a VC and could have bootstrapped and also survived for longer.
Learning it all is what gave me an appreciation for RDS! I’ve self managed a number of Postgres and MySQL databases, including a 10TB Postgres cluster with all of the HA and backup niceties.
While I generally agree as far as initial setup time goes, I favor RDS because I can forget about it, whereas the hand rolled version demands ongoing maintenance, and incurs a nonzero chance of simple mistakes that, if made, could result in a 100% dataloss unrecoverable scenario.
I’m also mostly talking about typical, funded startups here, as opposed to indie/solo devs. If you’re flying solo launching a tiny proof of concept that may only ever have a few users, by all means run it yourself if you’d like, but if you’ve raised money to grow faster and are paying employees to iterate rapidly searching for PMF…just pay for RDS and make sure as much time as possible is spent on product features that provide actual business value. It starts at like $15/month. The cost of simply not being laser-focused on product is far greater.
I’ve been the guy managing a critical self-hosted database in a small team, and it’s such a distraction from focusing on the actual core product.
To me, the cost of RDS covers tons of risks and time sinks: having to document the db server setup so I’m not the only one on the team who actually knows how to operate it, setting up monitoring, foolproof backups so I don’t need to worry that they’re silently failing because a volume is full and I misconfigured the monitoring, PITR for when someone ships a bad migration, one click HA so the database itself is very unlikely to wake me at 3am, blue/green deploys to make major version upgrades totally painless, never having to think about hardware failures or borked dist-upgrades, and so on.
Each of those is ultimately either undifferentiated work to develop in-house RDS features that could have been better spent on product, or a risk of significant data loss, downtime, or firefighting. RDS looks like a pretty good deal, up to a point.