I feel like it just depends on what you’re trying to do.
* data driven website with some internal api integration, maybe some client-side application or tooling? Put a server rack in a closet and get a fiber line.
* trying to serve the general public in a bursty, not-cacheable way? Probably going to have to carry a lot of machines that usually don’t do much, cloud might make more sense
* lots of ingress or DNS rules? A hybrid approach could make sense.
In general once you start thinking about scaling data to larger capacities is when you start considering the cloud, because just the storage solution ends up on a long amortization schedule if you need it to be resilient, let alone the servers you’re racking to drive the DB.
> In general once you start thinking about scaling data to larger capacities is when you start considering the cloud
What kind of capacities as a rule of thumb would you use? You can fit an awful lot of storage and compute on a single rack, and the cost for large DBs on AWS and others is extremely high, so savings are larger as well.
Well, if you want proper DR you really need an off-site backup, disk failover/recovery, etc. And if you don’t want to manually be maintaining individual drives then you’re looking at one of the big, expensive storage solutions with enterprise grade hardware, and those will easily cost some large multiple more than whatever 2U db server you end up putting in front of it.