251–260 of 407 posts
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Bad, short-sighted engineers will do that. An engineer who is not acting solely in the best interests of the wider organisation is a bad one. I would not want to work with a colleague who was so detached from reality that they wouldn't consider all GP's suggested facets. Engineering includes soft/business constraints as well as technical ones.
We are saying similar things.
Take a look at https://github.com/vitabaks/autobase In case you want to self host but also have something that takes care of all that extra work for you
I think we can get to the point where we have self-hosted agents that can manage db maintenance and recovery. There could be regular otel -> * -> Grafana -> ~PagerDuty -> you and TriageBot which would call specialists to gather state and orchestrate a response. Scripts could kick off health reports and trigger operations. Upgrades and recovery runbooks would be clearly defined and integration tested. It would empower…
https://supabase.com/docs/guides/self-hosting/docker
however, like always, 'complexity has to live somewhere'. I doubt even Opus 4.5 could handle this. as soon as you get into database records themselves, context is going to blow up and you're going to have a bad time
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Yes but the fact that it's "not their fault" keeps the person from getting fired. Don't underestimate the power of CYA
This is a major reason the cloud commands such a premium. It’s a way to make down time someone else’s problem. The other factor is eliminating the “one guy who knows X” problem in IT. What happens if that person leaves or you have to let them go? But with managed infrastructure there’s a pool of people who know how to write terraform or click buttons and manage it and those are more interchangeable than someone’s DIY…
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> What am I missing? IME the need for 24x7 for B2B apps is largely driven by global customer scope. If you have customers in North American and Asia, now you need 24x7 (and x365 because of little holiday overlap). That being said, there are a number of B2B apps/industries where global scope is not a thing. For example, many providers who operate in the $4.9 trillion US healthcare market do not have any international…
I’ve worked for banks, multiple large and small US healthcare-related companies, and businesses that didn’t use their software when they were closed for the night. All of those places needed their backend systems to be up 24/7. The banks ran reports and cleared funds with nightly batches—hundreds of jobs a night for even small banking networks. The healthcare companies needed to receive claims and process patient upd…
But there are also a not-insignificant number of important systems where nobody is on a pager, where there is no call rotation[1]. Computers are much more reliable than they were even 20 years ago. It is an Acceptable Business Choice to not have 24x7 monitoring for some subset of systems.
Until very recently[2], Citibank took their public website/user portal offline for hours a week.
1 - if a system does not have a fully staffed call rotation with escalations, it's not prepared for a real off-hours uptime challenge 2 - they may still do this, but I don't have a way to verify right now.
Self-hosting is more a question of responsibility I'd say. I am running a couple of SaaS products and self-host at much better performance at a fraction of the cost of running this on AWS. It's amazing and it works perfectly fine. For client projects, however, I always try and sell them on paying the AWS fees, simply because it shifts the responsibility of the hardware being "up" to someone else. It does not inherent…
> Self-hosting is more a question of responsibility I'd say. I am running a couple of SaaS products and self-host at much better performance at a fraction of the cost of running this on AWS It is. You need to answer the question: what are the consecuences of your service being down for lets say 4 hours or some security patch isn't properly applied or you have not followed the best practices in terms of security? Many…
In a business context the "time is money" thing actually makes sense, because there's a reasonable likelihood that the business can put the time to a more profitable use in some other way. But in a personal context it makes no sense at all. Realistically, the time I spend cooking or cleaning was not going to earn me a dime no matter what else I did, therefore the opportunity cost is zero. And this is true for almost everyone out there.
Self-hosting is more a question of responsibility I'd say. I am running a couple of SaaS products and self-host at much better performance at a fraction of the cost of running this on AWS. It's amazing and it works perfectly fine. For client projects, however, I always try and sell them on paying the AWS fees, simply because it shifts the responsibility of the hardware being "up" to someone else. It does not inherent…
Savvy Manager: “NoNameCMS often won’t take our support calls, but if Salesforce goes down it’s in the WSJ the next day.”
So, yeah, I guess there's much confusion about what a 'managed database' actually is ? Because for me, the table stakes are: -Backups: the provider will push a full generic disaster-recovery backup of my database to an off-provider location at least daily, without the need for a maintenance window -Optimization: index maintenance and storage optimization are performed automatically and transparently -Multi-datacenter…
Self-host things the boss won't call at 3 AM about: logs, traces, exceptions, internal apps, analytics. Don't self-host the database or major services.
A popular choice for smaller workloads has always been the Hetzner cloud which I finally poured into a ready-to-use Terraform module https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/hetzner/rds/index....
Main focus here is a tested solution with automated backup and recovery, leaving out the complicated parts like clustering, prioritizing MTTR over MTBF.
The naming of RDS is a little bit presumptuous I know, but it works quite well :-)
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I'll be reductive in conversations like this just to help push the pendulum back a little. The prevailing attitude seems (to me) like people find self-hosting mystical and occult, yet there's never been a better time to do it. > But it’s very case-by-case. There’s no general rule like “always prefer self hosting” or “always rent real estate, never buy” that applies broadly enough to be useful. I don't know if anyone…
No argument here, that’s a fair and thoughtful response, and you’re not wrong regarding the prejudice against self-hosting (and for what it’s worth I absolutely come from the era where that was the default approach, have done it extensively, like it, and still do it/recommend it when it makes sense). > “ geek code" thing we were doing a while back Not sure what you’re referring to. “Shibboleet”, perhaps? https://xkcd…