[ciaranlee]

Operating such services in a fairly static production environment is indeed simple, though in many cases I suspect it’s wasted effort that could be better spent elsewhere.

In our (Intercom) case these tasks are not simple.

We are lucky to have had exponential growth in most metrics (including database throughput) for the entire 7 years of our existence. This is a harsh environment for datastores! A 99.9% SLA makes it even harder.

We are also nowhere near finished building out our vision for the product. We prefer to focus on that instead of operating data stores, which we can pay someone else to do.