The old school sysadmins who know technology well are still around but there is increasingly less of them while the demand skyrockets as our species gives computers an increasing number of responsibilities.
There is tremendous demand for technology that works well and works reliably. Sure, setting up a database running on an EC2 instance is easy. But do you know all of the settings to make the db safe to access? Do you maintain it well, patch it, replicate it, etc? This can all be done by one of the old school sysadmins. But they are rare to find, and not easy to replace. It's hard to judge from the outside, even if you are an expert in the field.
So when the job market doesn't have the amount of sysadmins/devops engineers available, then the cloud offers a good replacement. Even if you as an individual company can solve it by offering more money and having a tougher selection process, this doesn't scale over the entire field, as at that point the whole number of available experts comes in.
Aurora is definitely expensive, but there is cheaper alternatives to it. Full disclosure, I'm employed by one of these alternative vendors (Neon). You don't have to use it, but many people do and it makes their life easier. The market is expected to grow a lot. Clouds seem to be one of the ways our industry is standardizing.
I’m not even a sysadmin, I just learned how to do stuff in Gentoo in the early ‘00s. Undoubtedly there are graybeards who will laugh at the ease of tooling that was available to me.
> But do you know all of the settings to make the db safe to access? Do you maintain it well, patch it, replicate it, etc?
Yes, but to be fair, I’m a DBRE (and SRE before that). I’m not advocating that someone without fairly deep knowledge attempt to do this in prod at a company of decent size. But your tiny startup? Absolutely; chuck a default install of Postgres or MySQL onto Debian, and optionally tune 2 – 3 settings (shared_buffers, effective_cache_size, and random_page_cost for Postgres; (innodb_buffer_pool_* and sync_array_size for MySQL – the latter isn’t necessary until you have high concurrency, but it also can’t be changed without a restart so may as well). Pick any major backup solution for your DB (Barman for Postgres, XtraBackup for MySQL, etc.), and TEST YOUR BACKUPS. That’s about it. Apply any security patches (or use unattended-upgrades, just be careful) as they’re released, and don’t do anything outside of your distro’s package management. You’ll be fine.
Re: Neon, I’ve not used it, but I’ve read your docs extensively. It’s the most interesting Postgres-aaS product I’ve seen, alongside postgres.ai, but you’re (I think) targeting slightly different audiences. I wish you luck!
> It’s the most interesting Postgres-aaS product I’ve seen, alongside postgres.ai, but you’re (I think) targeting slightly different audiences. I wish you luck!
There is tremendous demand for technology that works well and works reliably. Sure, setting up a database running on an EC2 instance is easy. But do you know all of the settings to make the db safe to access? Do you maintain it well, patch it, replicate it, etc? This can all be done by one of the old school sysadmins. But they are rare to find, and not easy to replace. It's hard to judge from the outside, even if you are an expert in the field.
So when the job market doesn't have the amount of sysadmins/devops engineers available, then the cloud offers a good replacement. Even if you as an individual company can solve it by offering more money and having a tougher selection process, this doesn't scale over the entire field, as at that point the whole number of available experts comes in.
Aurora is definitely expensive, but there is cheaper alternatives to it. Full disclosure, I'm employed by one of these alternative vendors (Neon). You don't have to use it, but many people do and it makes their life easier. The market is expected to grow a lot. Clouds seem to be one of the ways our industry is standardizing.