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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.
Or it could be that they haven't run into problems yet. If you overbuild your hardware or your software is efficient enough, you don't need as much tweaking.
It's questionable, but I don't think implausible.
“yet” is the keyword there for sure. It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when. Even if they’re flushed with cash and grossly over provision their systems, sooner or later, a huge vulnerability will roll around and someone will need to setup / update the OS, ensuring quorum is available for their cluster, fail over traffic during update windows, etc etc etc.
The stacks are getting so insurmountably huge, it’s not possible to just drop a new cluster at their described scale without significantly increasing the workload for an existing team.
Yup. By moving out, they already let go of a lot of security services that came with their cloud subscription like CASB, automated patching, DB maintenance, security/network monitoring, etc. You have to replace all of that with people and on-prem tools/systems.