[mdeeks]

I'll take a shot at this. There is always an asterisk under every one of these. Every company and situation is different.

If you're a tiny startup or hobby with literally no money, it might make sense for you to manage it yourself because you have no choice.

Once you have some money and a viable business, then your value is no longer your ability to spend your time running Postgres, ensuring backups and restores work, creating replicas, upgrading software, and setting up all of the monitoring tools. You provide MUCH more value spending your time and abilities building things that are core to the business that let you make money and grow.

No doubt you can do it all and save some cash. But you have to do it regularly if you want confidence that everything you have built still works. With RDS, you pay them some extra for a near guarantee that it will all just work 100% of the time.

Once you become a large company with tons of engineers and you start to bump into limits of RDS, then it might make sense to run it yourself again. It is a significant burden to do it correctly 100% of the time. Your entire business can fail if you don't do your job right.

[nunez]

If I were a "tiny startup", I would absolutely leverage RDS in the first instance. Last thing I want to spend time doing is setting us Postgres and accumulating tech debt from a bad or suboptimal install. There are RDS instances that qualify for Free Tier as well if you're running _really_ lean.

In fact, the only time that I would consider migrating to a DB on EC2 is if the database isn't supported by RDS (DB2, for example, though I think there are solutions for this now), the licensing for RDS makes it cost-prohibitive or if the client needed to be able to really tweak the database engine or daemons.

[mdeeks]

The key words were "literally no money". By tiny startup I meant one or two people without any funding, revenue, and saddled with life expenses like rent, food, college savings, etc.

I definitely agree that a DB on EC2 is tech debt. But sometimes that is something you have to accept for immediate financial reasons while you figure out how to create a product with revenue to cover costs.