Fair, but my point is that AWS has a full team of people that built and contributed to that magic box that is managing the database. When something goes wrong, they're the first ones to know (ideally) and they have a lot of know-how on what went wrong, what the automation is doing, how to remediate issues, etc.
When you use a k8s operator you're using an off the shelve component with very little idea of what is doing and how. When things go wrong, you don't have a team of experts to look into what failed and why.
The tradeoff here is obviously cost, but my point is those two levels of "automation" are not comparable.
Edit: well, when I write "you" I mean most people (me included)
> Fair, but my point is that AWS has a full team of people that built and contributed to that magic box that is managing the database.
You sure about that? I used to work at AWS, and although I wasn't on K8S in particular, I can tell you from experience that AWS is a revolving door of developers who mostly quit the instant their two-year sign-on bonus is paid out, because working there sucks ass. The ludicrous churn means there actually isn't very much buildup of institutional knowledge.
> Fair, but my point is that AWS has a full team of people that built and contributed to that magic box that is managing the database
You think so. The real answer is maybe maybe not. They could have all left and the actual maintainers now don't actually know the codebase. There's no way to know.
> When things go wrong, you don't have a team of experts to look into what failed and why.
I've been on both sides of consulting / managed services teams and each time the "expert" was worse than the junior. Sure, there's some luck and randomness but it's not as clear cut as you make it.
> and they have a lot of know-how on what went wrong, what the automation is doing, how to remediate issues, etc.
And to continue on the above I've also worked at SaaS/IaaS/PaaS where the person on call doesn't know much about the product (not always their fault) and so couldn't contribute much on incident.
There's just to much trust and good faith in this reply. I'm not advocating to manage everything yourself but yes, don't trust that the experts have everything either.
If you don't want complexity of operators, you'll be probably OK with DB cluster outside of k8s. They're quite easy to setup, automate and there are straightforward tools to monitor them (eg. from Percona).
If you want to fully replicate AWS it may be more expensive than just paying AWS. But for most use cases it's simply not necessary.
When you use a k8s operator you're using an off the shelve component with very little idea of what is doing and how. When things go wrong, you don't have a team of experts to look into what failed and why.
The tradeoff here is obviously cost, but my point is those two levels of "automation" are not comparable.
Edit: well, when I write "you" I mean most people (me included)