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You’re right of course.

From my point of view managed databases only really make sense for toy projects, if you’re using these things at scale it’s much more economical to buy some servers and hire some people of your own, and use plain pre-VC Redis. But big corporations seem to have some kind of a fetish for lighting money on fire, and the fight here is fundamentally over in whose fireplace to do it.




> From my point of view managed databases only really make sense for toy projects

it is more expensive to buy managed, but you offload work. I would imagine toy projects are more cash constrained, and makes more sense to rent cheap servers and roll your own.

On the other hand, larger scale projects would rather pay to offload the work of managing and scaling redis.


Toy project are both cash and time constrained, but they’re at a scale where managed is cheap enough because they want to get you hooked.

Large scale projects can take advantage of economies of scale and hire ops people. I’ve found cloud support pretty lacklustre compared to having someone to talk to face-to-face who understands the whole stack for your particular application.

Of course conventional corporate wisdom says waste as much as you like on services as long as you keep payroll down, that may be a bigger challenge than any of the technical ones.


In my experience using redis, one of its better attributes is how easy it is to manage and scale. I've never scaled it to say, Facebook levels, but at that scale, I'm not sure managed services make much sense either.


Yes, it is ludicrous. My company uses hosted databases and "droplets" from DigitalOcean. Their pricing is absolutely absurd. I always wondered how they stay in business, but now I know.




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