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Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

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Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#41

Post by sroussey »

electroly wrote: post #8
vasco wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a huge instance with an enterprise license on top. Most large SaaS companies can run off of $5k / m or cheaper RDS deployments which isn't enough to pay someone. The amount of people running half a million a year RDS bills might not be that large. For most people RDS is worth it as soon as you have backup requirements and would have to implement them yourself.

Definitely--I recommend this after you've reached the point where you're writing huge checks to AWS. Maybe this is just assumed but I've never seen anyone else add that nuance to the "just use RDS" advice. It's always just "RDS is worth it" full stop, as in this article.

I mean, just use supabase instead. So much easier than RDS. Why even deal with AWS directly? Might as well have a Colo if you need AWS.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#42

Post by calvinmorrison »

sgarland wrote: post #15
Scubabear68 wrote: post #3

The kitchen sink database used by everybody is such a common problem, yet it is repeated over and over again. If you grow it becomes significant tech debt and a performance bottleneck. Fortunately, with managed DBs like RDS it is really easy to run individual DB clusters per major app.

The downside is then you have many, many DBs to fight with, to monitor, to tune, etc. This is rarely a problem when things are small, but as they grow, the bad schema decisions made by empowering DBA-less teams to run their own infra become glaringly obvious.

It's because I hate databases and programming separately. I would rather slow code then have to dig into some database procdure. Its just another level of separation thats too mentally hard to manage. Its like... my queries go into a VM and now I have to worry about how the VM is performing.

I wish and maybe there is a programming language with first class database support. I mean really first class not just let me run queries but almost like embedded into the language in a primal way where I can both deal with my database programming fancyness and my general development together.

Sincerely someone who inherited a project from a DBA.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#43

Post by gfodor »

breckenedge wrote: post #23

> There are no great FaaS options for running GPU workloads, which is why we could never go fully FaaS. I keep wondering when this is going to show up. We have a lot of service providers, but even more frameworks, and every vendor seems to have their own bespoke API.

I just started playing with modal.com and so far it seems good. I haven't run anything in production yet, so YMMV.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#44

Post by sroussey »

sgarland wrote: post #30
renewiltord wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get the higher end machines on AWS unless you're a big guy. We have Epyc 9684X on-prem. Cannot match that at the price on AWS. That's just about making the choices. Most companies are not DB-primary.

I think most people who’ve never experienced native NVMe for a DB are also unaware of just how blindingly fast it is. Even io2 Block Express isn’t the same.

Most databases expressly say don’t run storage over a network.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#47

Post by CoolCold »

sgarland wrote: post #33
Scubabear68 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a downside to me. Each team maintains their own DB and pays for their own choices. In the kitchen sink model all teams are tied together for performance and scalability, and some bad apple applications can ruin the party for everyone. Seen this countless times doing due diligence on startups. The universal kitchen sink DB is almost always one of the major tech debt items.

I’m a DBRE, which means it’s somehow always my fault until proven otherwise. And even then, it’s usually on me to work around the insane schema dreamt up by the devs. Multi-tenant DBs can work fine as long as every app has its own users, everyone goes through a connection pooler / load balancer, and every user has rate limits. You want to write shitty queries that time out? Not my problem. Your GraphQL BFF bullshit i…

You forgot the modern mantra - dev team is always right!

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#50

Post by viraptor »

steveBK123 wrote: post #11
electroly wrote: post #6

> The markup cost of using RDS (or any managed database) is worth it. Every so often I price out RDS to replace our colocated SQL Server cluster and it's so unrealistically expensive that I just have to laugh. It's absurdly far beyond what I'd be willing to pay. The markup is enough to pay for the colocation rack, the AWS Direct Connects, the servers, the SAN, the SQL Server licenses, the maintenance contracts, and a…

RDS pricing is deranged at the scales I've seen too. $60k/year for something I could run on just a slice of one of my on-prem $20k servers. This is something we would have run 10s of. $600k/year operational against sub-$100k capital cost pays DBAs, backups, etc with money to spare. Sure, maybe if you are some sort of SaaS with a need for a small single DB, that also needs to be resilient, backed up, rock solid bullet…

Lots of cases. It doesn't even have to be a tiny database. Within Also, Aurora gives you the block level cluster that you can't deploy on your own - it's way easier to work with than the usual replication.
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