[earino]

Maybe I'm jaded, but 330k a year or so for the very backbone of your entire real time query analytics infrastructure just doesn't seem unreasonable? This is highly specialized software, tuned and architected for the purpose of running relatively complex analytics queries and aggregates fast enough to allow interactive real time exploratory analysis.

I dont think it's insane to believe that a profitable mature data informed business should be expected to spend 1/3 of a million a year for the ability to have all that data live and available without deep latency.

I can also agree that this is quite a bit for a startup, but if the unit economics of the startup require that this kind of data be available for interactive exploring, there's going to be a deep challenge down the road in scaling it I think?

To your point, if a startup runs through 20 million and their biggest problem is paying AWS bills, then they are probably a failed startup and folks should move on towards whatever next exciting thing is on the horizon.

[tw04]

With 10TB of data, you could also do it a hell of a lot cheaper and faster on premise.

[trhway]

One engineer/DBA to deal with your cluster is those 330k/year.

[brianwawok]

Baby startups don't have a DBA, they have a dev that kinda knows SQL.

[foobarian]

Don't those computers cost a lot? Like $10k per blade? Granted it's probably amortized but still...

On the other hand the Redshift cluster doesn't run itself, despite what Amazon says. You still need at least a part time DBA guy.

[eitland]

Last time I worked with physical servers the rule was to avoid blades and run rackmount until space or termal was an issue.

And as long as you were not into GPUs you could get some really decent HP servers at somewhere around $2000 - $7000 depending on your storage needs.

[rad_gruchalski]

In your part of the world, maybe. The Valley does not reflect average DBA salaries around the world.

[beachstartup]

there are DBA services that do an excellent job for a fraction of that price. they also do AWS stuff too.

full-time DBA's work for either enormous corporations, or database consulting firms. it's very rare you will see some random small-medium company with even one DBA on payroll.

[manigandham]

You dont really need a full time DBA to handle 10TB these days.