Is there a good name for this theory that self-hosting something is more reliable? I mean yeah, if you have an outage it only affects you and your customers so I guess it's an improvement in that regard, but thinking you're better at running software than a SaaS is hubris.
The inverse is “appeal to higher power”; (implication being that its almost religion since it’s based on faith).
However: if you think that running large systems is hard, then it follows that it’s better to deploy small systems.
There can be times to outsource for sure, and I’m being relatively glib: but this idea of rent vs own is quite pervasive in the industry and it leads to dangerous situations where entire companies grind to a halt because these trade offs were talked down.
Regardless of that; understanding the trade offs is important, the famous “your nines are not my nines” is good to reference here: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/
Disagreed on several points.
First off, if you're using something like Sentry, chances are that building and running software is your job so it should not be a problem. If self-hosting Sentry is a problem I would start doubting the skills of your tech team.
Second, running a service for your own use is very different to running a service that has to scale to the entire world. Your service won't need as many moving & distributed parts as the SaaS Sentry since it will only ever have to handle a fraction of the latter's traffic.
Finally, if you're in control, you can schedule risky maintenance operations during times where a potential accident (operator error, etc) won't affect your business. You can't do that with an SaaS.
Sentry is a pretty complex piece of software with a lot of moving parts. They have good orchestration around it, either Helm charts for Kube deployments or a giant bash script managing docker-compose for mono-machine, and it just works. However understanding either of them, and being capable of debugging aren't skills i expect your average developer to have. It's more for SRE/Infra/Platform/etc. folk. Like i don't expect the average developer to be capable of debugging Kubernetes on their own.
Of course, many of them absolutely can, but many more would prefer that to people who do that for a living. The type of developer using Heroku and other PaaSes precisely to avoid getting their hands too deep into infrastructure stuff.
> If self-hosting Sentry is a problem I would start doubting the skills of your
> tech team.
However, my experience is by and large at early-stage startups, and so I also can't think of any instance where I'd want to have my team working on that when they could be working on adding value to our product. If I can pay Sentry to handle setup, scaling, maintenance, etc (and I do!), then that's worth it when weighed against the dollar and opportunity cost of having my team handle it.
That's not to mention maintenance or other issues.
We as an industry build our businesses on proprietary solutions that are difficult (nearing on impossible) or extremely expensive to self-host.
I love that there are options for SaaS; I strongly dislike being locked into SaaS -- and it feels like a lot of the companies I join are locked into some SaaS offering with no possible migration plan, despite dubious uptimes, awful support, rising prices and overall dissatisfaction with the product. (atlassian springs to mind immediately)
It's tech debt, of a certain type; and some tech debt is acceptable, especially in a startup.
Having an option such as Sentries to self-host is basically the best you're going to get... Gitlab is the same: Pay them to host, or host it yourself, the product is the same, the only "debt" incurred is the setup and migration, which is much lower than, say, Jira -> YouTrack.
I am however a proponent of self-hosting open source things you could get as a managed service. I.e databases, elastic search, redis etc. Provided you have the expertise to do that and benifit from it. For example, I used to run a redis setup that would failover in <5s on crashes and with basically 0 downtime for upgrades etc. Now we use ElastiCache and an upgrade will cause serveral minutes of downtime. I haven't had redis crash ever, but I have had elasticache & rds instances dissapear. Sometimes failover works, sometimes not and you have little to no wayt ot find out what is going on.