I'm not advocating that everyone should self-host everything. But the pendulum has swung too far toward managed services. There's a large sweet spot where self-hosting makes perfect sense, and more teams should seriously consider it. Start small. If you're paying more than $200/month for RDS, spin up a test server and migrate a non-critical database. You might be surprised by how straightforward it is. The future of infrastructure is almost certainly more hybrid than it's been recently: managed services where they add genuine value, self-hosted where they're just expensive abstractions. Postgres often falls into the latter category. Footnotes They're either just hosting a vanilla postgres instance that's tied to the deployed hardware config, or doing something opaque with edge deploys and sharding. In the latter case they near guarantee your DB will stay highly available but costs can quickly spiral out of control. ↩ Maybe up to billions at this point. ↩ Even on otherwise absolutely snail speed hardware. ↩ This was Jeff Bezos's favorite phrase during the early AWS days, and it stuck. ↩ Similar options include OVH, Hetzner dedicated instances, or even bare metal from providers like Equinix. ↩ AWS RDS & S3 has had several major outages over the years. The most memorable was the 2017 US-East-1 outage that took down half the internet. ↩
Cloud hosting can become an expensive abstraction layer quickly. I also think there's an entire generation of coders / engineers who treat silo'd cloudhosting as a given, without considering other options and their benefits. Large window for selfhosting in which postgres almost always falls