undefined | Better HN

0 pointszetalyrae2y ago0 comments

>Cost

It's a bad trade. Thousands of hours of a high human capital computer scientist vs. a few tens of dollars a month for RDS.

>Reliability

Empirically false: none of this would have happened if Tarsnap used Postgres instead of a home-spun database.

0 comments

nonethewiser2y ago

>> Cost

> It's a bad trade.

Maybe. But that's the reason. You never acknowledged that advantage in your question so it needed to be emphasized

zetalyraeOP2y ago

It never occurred to me that anyone would need it explained to them that RDS is cheaper than the time of any software engineer.

The opportunity cost of building your own database is 10,000x the cost of running RDS for a year.

foldr2y ago

That sort of logic doesn't really apply here because:

* RDS costs obviously scale linearly with ongoing time and probably scale linearly with the total amount of data being backed up. So depending on the revenue of the business, these extra costs could easily end up outweighing the (notional) cost of the time saved, which is mostly a one-off expense.

* The cost of a software engineer's time is notional in the context of a one-person business. The author of Tarsnap isn't going to be able to employ fewer than zero additional software engineers to maintain Tarsnap because of the time saved by using RDS.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse