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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

> but thinking you're better at running software than a SaaS is hubris.

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.

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> 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

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.

I can't think of any team I've worked at in the past year for whom reading the self-hosted Sentry docs and standing up an instance would be impossible.

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.

Just so we're clear: I completely agree with that stance. My grandparent comment is quipping that the option is rarely on the table.

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.

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