You also benefit from the tailwind of the CitusData team making continued improvement to the extension, whereas an in-house system depends on your company's ability to hire and retain people to maintain + improve the in-house system.
It's hard to account for the value of benefits that have yet to accrue, but this kind of analysis, even if you pretty heavily-discount that future value, tilts the ROI in favor of solutions like Citus, IMO. Especially if your time horizon is 5+ or 10+ years out.
Like you said, if they made this decision 3ish years ago, you would have had to be pretty trusting on that future value. A choice, made today, hinges less on that variable.
Huh, I would have thought the opposite. Companies at Figma size are easily able to hire talent to maintain a core part of their engineering stack. On the other hand, they retain no control of Citus decision making. Those tailwinds could easily have been headwinds if they went in a direction that did not suit Figma.
I think this is true for things higher up the "stack", but doesn't necessarily apply to tech like Postgres [and Citus, IMO].
The line separating "build in-house" vs "use OSS" exists, and it's at a different layer of the stack in every company. IMO, for most companies in 2024, the line puts Citus on the same side as Postgres.
FWIW, I would have assumed that Citus would be on the other end of the line, until I had to look into Citus for work for a similar reason that Figma did. You can pick and choose among the orthogonal ideas they implement that most cleanly apply to the present stage of your business, and I would've chosen to build things the same way they did (TBH, Figma's choices superficially appear to be 1:1 to Citus's choices).
It's hard to account for the value of benefits that have yet to accrue, but this kind of analysis, even if you pretty heavily-discount that future value, tilts the ROI in favor of solutions like Citus, IMO. Especially if your time horizon is 5+ or 10+ years out.
Like you said, if they made this decision 3ish years ago, you would have had to be pretty trusting on that future value. A choice, made today, hinges less on that variable.