It's all about trade off.
Do you want to spend thousands of dollar upfront for that DB server with sweet sweet NVME SSDs, of which your application might not even use 1% before the app get scraped?
Do you want to spend thousands of dollar upfront for that DB server with sweet sweet NVME SSDs, of which your application might not even use 1% before the app get scraped?
If you can’t afford to throw down enough money on a single box to bring a business up then you’re fucked anyway.
I know whole businesses that make a lot of money and never needed more than that box. (And a hot spare)
However, these days, I notice my DBA skills atrophying because LLMs have encoded most of the answers and diagnostics I need in their weights. Coupled with something like Nix, spinning up new servers including backups and everything, it's easier easier than ever to run your own production database instance.
It would really suck to learn that your LLM-generated disaster recovery plan isn't viable when attempting to use it to recover from an actual disaster.
This isn't a whole lot different than what you should be doing to ensure systems not managed by LLMs are designed and operating properly, of course, which I guess is sort of my point.
Hiding behind the LLM, or even a cloud service like RDS makes you think you can get out of a corner, but you are nowhere near that. Practice, drills, experience are the only solution here. The illusion of that is dangerous.
I spent a couple of days recently digging one of our associated businesses out of the shit because they killed a postgres on RDS instance (AWS bug!) and couldn't google or LLM their way out of it. It hit the trade press and did a lot of damage to them.
If you're not going to do the work, don't take on customers.
Of course you need understanding for when shit hits the fan, but that applies regardless of whether it's a human or an LLM writing the code.
LLMs remove personal exploration from tasks and that's where you really get to know things.
When you optimise for fast and not correct, things are fucked.
I think you overestimate the level of DBA skills smaller startups have in house.
If you have found a way for a company to hold off on taking on customers until they can afford a proper DBA, I'd love to hear more about it. But it sounds backwards to me. In my experience, it typically goes the other way around: only after taking on enough customers to be decently profitable can a company afford a real DBA.
Until then, the choice used to be between managed database services or striking luck with a developer that had some database interest. These days, it's between managed database services, striking luck, or giving the developers access to an LLM. The LLM doesn't replace DBA skills that used to be there. There weren't any DBA skills there to begin with.
However, the main cost would be colocation - it's risen quite a bit.
I wouldn't use Ryzen on a production server myself.
I doubt there's much of a meaningful difference other than a jumper for the brand. Retail pricing and availability might differ.
The day it broke, it's a PITA.
You need that RAID card which is not available anywhere around you.
You need to visit your Data Center, but you suddenly have issues with security and you need to arrange all that stuff.
You need to buy DDR stick but you need to wait a month for delivery.
The guy who knows how to insert a stick took a vacation week ago, and everyone else is too afraid to touch big iron box.
With cloud, you either don't notice that, because they have scale and they have spare parts and they have personnel 24/7. Or worst case you order identical server and deploy your app, hopefully in a few hours restoring from backup.
And for some people it might never broke. But it's all the uncertainty and fear that leads people to cloud solutions. You don't plan for average outcome, you plan for worst outcome.
I can't comment on total costs / costs over time though.
And you're not immune from those issues in AWS. What happens when you run out of EBS IOPS or have to change instance type and it won't boot? What happens when your instance fails? What happens if you hit a quota limit in the middle of a failover?
AWS support is fucking awful unless you pay $5k a month or 10% of your total spend (whatever is greater) and then it's only mediocre.
If you're small enough to not be able to justify spares, then rent servers instead. It's still cheaper than the big cloud providers.
> You need to visit your Data Center, but you suddenly have issues with security and you need to arrange all that stuff.
You rarely do. Anywhere beyond the cheapest third-rate colo provider provides "remote hands" services.
Even when managing several racks worth of hardware, I'd go into the colo facilities a couple of times a year at most.
> and they have spare parts and they have personnel 24/7
Even tiny colo-providers still have personnel 24/7, and you can buy fractional devops services for small retainers from any number of providers (like me).
I remember we ran a pretty large UK website on 5 x Pentium II boxes, using a Perl stack which is not exactly memory efficient. Later we ran a chat server for hundreds of thousands of school kids on a single server which was (if I remember this right) a Pentium III with 128 MB (yes, megabytes) of memory and a spinning hard disk.
Where the money gets wasted, is doing a different server per project, putting everything in different resource groups, and then overprovisioning those servers many times over. So much wasted capacity because of simple project structure preferences.
And then there is also the fact some features are locked behind more expensive models, which is also rarely cost efficient.
All I am saying is, if you simply create 1 database server on the cloud, with a database per app, and different schema's, isolated users, ... it can stay super cheap. But good look getting through an enterprise cybersecurity audit or ISO27000+SOC2 certification.
It's absolutely fine. Everyone has just gone stupid recently.
People have zero concept of how incredibly absurdly fast even a slow computer is. Storage is literally 1000x faster than it was 15 years ago. My first job was firmware for enterprise storage arrays and IIRC we were aiming for 3M IOPS. That's not much more than what kids can put in their PS5 now, and these were arrays running companies like Walmart and JPMC.
Which is to say, it's good advice.
It lets you load your dedicated servers far higher than what you can safely do if you don't have the option of using a cloud provider for burst traffic, but in practice most people will very rarely need it.
In 30 years of hosting on-prem or in colo facilities, I've never once bought hardware up front for corporate accounts.
With the multi million dollars A MONTH purchase commitment contracts I've seen in my previous employers, you could use a single month budget to buy hardware that could serve our applications for years.
totally different words