[sanderjd]

This sounds medium to high complexity to me. You need to do all those things, and also have multiple people who know how to do them, and also make sure that you don't lose all the people who know how to do them, and have one of those people on call to be able to troubleshoot and fix things if they go wrong, and have processes around all that. (At least if you are running in production with real customers depending on you, you should have all those things.)

With a managed solution, all of that is amortized into your monthly payment, and you're sharing the cost of it across all the customers of the provider of the managed offering.

Personally, I would rather focus on things that are in or at least closer to the core competency of our business, and hire out this kind of thing.

[objektif]

You are right. Are you actually seriously considering whether to go fully managed or self managed at this point? Pls go AWS route and thank me later :)

[sanderjd]

No not at all, I have the same opinion as you! But I'm curious to understand the opposite view.

[Symbiote]

I ran through roughly our numbers here [1], it looks like self-hosted costs us about 25% of AWS.

I didn't include labour costs, but the self-hosted tasks (set up of hardware, OS, DB, backup, monitoring, replacing a failed component which would be really unusual) are small compared to the labour costs of the DB generally (optimizing indices, moving data around for testing etc, restoring from a backup).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910521

[sanderjd]

Yes thank you for that. I always feel like these up front cost analyses miss (or underrate) the ongoing operational cost to monitor and be on call to fix infrastructure when problems occur. But I do find it plausible that the cost savings are such that this can be a wise choice nonetheless.