What irks me about so many comments in this thread is that they often totally ignore questions of scale, the shape of your workloads, staffing concerns, time constraints, stage of your business, whether you require extensions, etc.
There is a whole raft of reasons why you might be a candidate for self-hosting, and a whole raft of reasons why not. This article is deeply reductive, and so are many of the comments.
Engineers almost never consider any of those questions. And instead deploy the maximally expensive solution their boss will say ok to.
Bad, short-sighted engineers will do that. An engineer who is not acting solely in the best interests of the wider organisation is a bad one. I would not want to work with a colleague who was so detached from reality that they wouldn't consider all GP's suggested facets. Engineering includes soft/business constraints as well as technical ones.
We are saying similar things.
Ah, you are implying that most engineers are bad, I see. In that case I agree too
I don’t know if they are bad engineers, but they have poor judgment.
I bet you also believe database is the single source of truth, right?
I find it is the opposite way around. I come up with <simple solution> based on open source tooling and I am forced instead to use <expensive enterprise shite> which is 100% lock in proprietary BS because <large corporate tech company> is partnered and is subsidising development. This has been a near constant throughout my career.
I agree, my statement is too coarse. There can be a lot of organizational pressure to produce complexity and it’s not fair to just blame engineers.
I’ve given a lot of engineers tasks only to find they are “setting up kubernetes cluster so I can setup automated deployments with a dashboard for …”
And similarly in QA I rarely see a cost/benefit consideration for a particular test or automation. Instead it’s we are going to fully automate this and analyze every possible variable.