Getting our applications out of the cloud provided the main celebration for our exit, but seeing the actual spend tumble is the prize. See, the only way to get pricing in the cloud down from obscene to merely offensive is through reserved instances. This is where you sign up for a year or more in advance on a certain level of spend. Th...
They’re using a third party called deft to manage the hardware. Which is a reasonable middleground between cloud and self-operated, the more I think about it.
I haven’t seen a lot of info on what the cost of that management is though but it’s likely to be leagues less than AWS/GCP
It’s not just the hardware. “The cloud is expensive” is usually touted by people not understanding why managed services (like Aurora RDS and OpenSearch as suggested in the article) ‘cost more than running it themselves’ by not accounting the management costs.
A database service needs management not only in hardware (I.e. replace dead drives) but also in software (I.e. monitor cluster performance, tweak system settings to fit usage pattern, manage cluster health, etc etc). These management requires time from the ops team, often in multiple roles like SysAdmin, DBA, and Ops engineers. Fact that they claim to have moved to their own hardware without being on new talents to their ops team makes it questionable as to whether or not they actually understand the cost and If they’re overworking their existing ops team.