Have you ever been paid to do work before? There’s a price at which a business will prefer to pay to have SaaS/PaaS solve a problem. Allocating engineering hours to setting up and maintaining a Postgres cluster has a cost. You’ll want someone senior on it. Their time could be well over $100/hour. And that’s assuming your business is small enough to only need one DBA part time. A business that’s spending a ton on Aurora might need 3 specialists. Now you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. It could be better to just pay AWS.
However, at large scales cloud won’t make sense anymore. They do have a markup and eventually what you’re paying in markup could instead buy you a few full time employees.
Yes, many times, which is why I've developed this opinion.
> However, at large scales cloud won’t make sense anymore. They do have a markup and eventually what you’re paying in markup could instead buy you a few full time employees.
The issue is once you've finally realized this stuff matters, and have hired a DB team, I can practically guarantee that your schema is a horror show, your queries are hellish, and your product teams have neither the time nor inclination to unwind any of it. Your DB{A,RE}s are going to spend months in hell as they are suddenly made the scapegoats for every performance problem, and are powerless to fix anything, since their proposals require downtime, too much engineering effort, or both.
Hence my statement. Learn enough about this stuff so that when you do hire in specialists, the problems are more manageable.
You need to do things that are appropriate for a small company when you’re a small company. And then if you become a large company you change things to suit your new scale.
All of the troubles you described sound like bad management. I’m sorry if you’ve had to go through that. DBAs that are setting up a replacement are going to need time to do that right and expectations need to be set that this is a tricky problem.
However, at large scales cloud won’t make sense anymore. They do have a markup and eventually what you’re paying in markup could instead buy you a few full time employees.