[seanhunter]

Wanting to stay on RDS is a reason doesn't survive the sort of extra scrutiny that I said should be applied in situations where you're doing a lot of work towards an internal goal. It also says in the article that they thought it was too risky to migrate (but somehow building their own sharding solution is going to be less risky for some reason).

I could of course be wrong but it really just feels to me like the reasons given in the article are attempts to justify a decision that was actually made because of "not invented here" syndrome.

[thih9]

Looks like you can’t think of a good reason to stay on RDS in this case, is that correct?

[seanhunter]

I can totally see why they want to stay on RDS, but think the other considerations should almost certainly outweigh that.

My main point is this decision makes no sense on its face[1]. Obviously I'm lacking the real context, so there may be overwhelming circumstances which mean that it was the right decision anyway, but these weren't explained in TFA for me. In TFA the reasoning was superficial, and this is the sort of decision that really should be held to a very high standard because as I say these types of internal goals have the potential to burn a ton of valuable engineering time on things which don't affect the customer-facing offering.

Now we have in a sibling thread someone from notion saying they did the same thing and for me exactly the same reasoning applies. It could be that all these different Saas companies are so special that them each building their own individual postgres sharding solutions to work around the fact that they can't get a sharded, managed postgres instance makes sense. Or not.

[1] That's what I mean by saying it doesn't pass the sniff test. It might actually be the right decision but your instincts should rebel against it because it feels very wrong. So there needs to be a serious examination before going down that path.