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.
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.