[NorwegianDude]

What makes you think cloud is cheap, or reliable? AWS lambda does not provide any guarantees other than compensation if the uptime is less than 99.95 %. That is ~22 minutes/month. It's terrible. If it was reliable they would provide better guarantees. How long since a major outage? A couple of months.

Few people run everything themselves. Most use existing datacenters or rent the hardware. Then its basically the same as using a VPS from a cloud provider when it comes to difficulty and expertise.

[riku_iki]

> What makes you think cloud is cheap, or reliable?

"cheap" is relative, if your data is not large (gigabytes) then cost will likely be much smaller compared to expenses on engineer supporting custom solution.

> if the uptime is less than 99.95 %

It doesn't mean their services experience this downtime. They have their reputation supporting revenue on the line. Customers will go somewhere else if experience frequent downtime.

But the point is that with custom pgsql installation it is nontrivial to setup and support any kind of fault tolerance, plus you have a chance of all other kind of outages: network, your hosting provider, etc.

Buying cloud offering with one click looks like no brainer base line.

[hot_gril]

The only thing that should require very strict uptime is the database. Lambda (for your backends) says 99.95% per region, which does seem kinda low, more what I'd expect for an AZ than an entire region. Can you easily add a second region for more 9s?