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Comment by pfix | Hacker News Reader

I would really be interested in an actual comparison, where e.g. someone compares the full TCO of a mysql server with backup, hot standby in another data center and admin costs.

On AWS an Aurora RDS is not cheap. But I don't have to spend time or money on an admin.

Is the cost justified? Because that's what cloud is. Not even talking about the level of compliance I get from having every layer encrypted when my hosted box is just a screwdriver away from data getting out the old school way.

When I'm small enough or big enough, self managed makes sense and probably is cheaper. But when getting the right people with enough redundancy and knowledge is getting the expensive part...

But actually - I've never seen this in any if these arguments so far. Probably because actual time required to manage a db server is really unpredictable.

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> Probably because actual time required to manage a db server is really unpredictable.

This, and also startups are quite heterogeneous. If you have an engineer on your team with experience in hosting their own servers (or at least a homelab-person), setting up that service with sufficient resiliency for your average startup will be done within one relaxed afternoon. If your team consists of designers and engineers who hardly ever used a command line, setting up a shaky version of the same thing will cost you days - and so will any issue that comes up.

Its a skillset that is out of favour at the moment as well but having someone who has done serverops and devops and can develop as well is a bit of a money saver generally because they open up possibilities that don't exist otherwise. I think its a skillset that no one really hired for past about 2010 when cloud was mostly taking off and got replaced with cloud engineers or pure devops or ops people but there used to be people with this mixed skillset in most teams.

I've never had a server go down. Most companies don't need a hot server because it's never going to be needed.

AWS + Azure have both gone down with major outages indivudually more over the last 10 years than any of the servers in companies I worked with in the 10 years before that.

And in comparable periods, not a single server failed or disk failed or whatever.

So I get SOME companies need hot standby servers, almost no company, no SaaS, no startup, actually does.

Because if it's that mission critical, then they would have already had to move off the cloud due to how frequently AWs/Azure/etc. have gone down over the last 10 years, often for 1/2 day or so,

I've had a lot of servers going down. I've had data centers going down. For various reasons - but normally not a failed disk but configuration errors due to human error.

And I've had enough cases where the company relied on just that one guy who knew how things worked - and when they retired or left, you had big work ahead understanding the systems that guy maintained and never let anyone else touch. Yes, this might also be a leadership issue - but it's also an issue if you have no one else with that specific knowledge. So I prefer standardized, prepackaged, off the shelf solutions that I can hire replacable people for.

every box is a screwdriver away

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