your aws infra: 600-1000 month? hetzner: 200 per month?
Is 800/month gonna make a difference to your organization?
Imagine you launch new feature with performance regressions and suddenly your database is at 100% CPU usage
Managed database service will allow you to scale up the instance in a few clicks, so you can redo the feature with a better plan, instead of rushing to roll back or deploy a hot fix.
in these 258 euros I have 4 dedicated servers that never went down so far. One of the 4 is only for the database while the other 3 are for kubernetes which is managed and deployed using Rancher. Out of the 3, my cpu usage is 4 out of 28 so plenty of room to grow as everything is on overkill.
I do daily backups of the database and upload them to an S3. I know this is not the perfect solution but, for a company that small (mine is similar) $61k are not something to be ignored. I used that money on Adwords which brings much more value than spending huge amounts on something which rarely "shines" for my use case. In fact, I had more downtime in the cloud than I had with Hetzner - mostly because they perform updates (to kubernetes, to database engine etc) or they simply have outages.
Everything is subjective.
not the same as VM to dedicated
In the early stages of product development, how often does this scenario occur where your database is at 100% CPU utilization and the solve is not a new database index but instead a hotfix?
AWS bill is 5k plus per month
One deployment lead to regressions (^2 growth growing along with usage of the new feature)
When it became a problem I just upgraded the instance and made a ticket
the ticket was solved within next sprint, so 2 weeks or so minimum
Hetzner provides cheap and performant VPSses. Depending on the geo, it might be a better fit.
CTO says they have to expertise in "systems administration", yet they're running VPSes, and not managed services. This is exactly where some dev installs some software which is accessible by default. There you have your little dataleak.
So imo, CTO is wrong, but post doesn't have to be right per se.
5 small VMs, 2 big VMs, 1 managed db