> Black box debugging is one of the most time costuming engineering pursuits, & even when it's something widely documented & well supported like RDS, it's only really tuned for the lowest common denominator - the complexities of tuning someone else's system at scale can really add up to only marginally less effort than self-hosting (if there's any difference at all).
I'm really not sure what you're talking about here. I manage many RDS clusters at work. I think in total, we've spent maybe eight hours over the last three years "tuning" the system. It runs at about 100kqps during peak load. Could it be cheaper or faster? Probably, but it's a small fraction of our total infra spend and it's not keeping me up at night.
Virtually all the effort we've ever put in here has been making the application query the appropriate indexes. But you'd do no matter how you host your database.
Hell, even the metrics that RDS gives you for free make the thing pay for itself, IMO. The thought of setting up grafana to monitor a new database makes me sweat.
Ultimately, it depends on your stack & your bottlenecks. If you can afford to run slower queries then focusing your efforts elsewhere makes sense for you. We run ~25kqps average & mostly things are fine, but when on-call pages come in query performance is a common culprit. The time we've spent on that hasn't been significantly different to self-hosted persistence backends I've worked with (probably less time spent but far from orders of magnitudes - certainly not worthy of a bullet point in the "pros" column when costing application architectures.
But that almost certainly has to do with index use and configuration, not whether you're self hosting or not. RDS gives you essentially all of the same Postgres configuration options.
> even the metrics that RDS gives you for free make the thing pay for itself, IMO. The thought of setting up grafana to monitor a new database makes me sweat.
Sure, and I can install something to do RDS performance insights without querying PG stats, and something to schedule backups to another region, and something to aggregate the logs, and then I have N more things that can break.
I'm really not sure what you're talking about here. I manage many RDS clusters at work. I think in total, we've spent maybe eight hours over the last three years "tuning" the system. It runs at about 100kqps during peak load. Could it be cheaper or faster? Probably, but it's a small fraction of our total infra spend and it's not keeping me up at night.
Virtually all the effort we've ever put in here has been making the application query the appropriate indexes. But you'd do no matter how you host your database.
Hell, even the metrics that RDS gives you for free make the thing pay for itself, IMO. The thought of setting up grafana to monitor a new database makes me sweat.