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If you only need those things there’s also an off the shelf solution for log files. Time you spend reinventing the wheel is time you aren’t spending finding product-market fit (if you’ve already found it you wouldn’t even consider it because you’d be too busy servicing the flood of customers.)

Unless your company is so far past product market fit that it hires qualified applicants by the classfull or whatever-it-is is their product, they have no business coding up custom infra bits. The opportunity cost alone is sufficient argument against, though far from the only one.



I think that EBS is the difficult engineering problem that they purchased instead of built from scratch here. Writing binary records to a file and reading them all into memory is not going to be a time sink that prevents you from finding product/market fit. The $120,000/year burn rate on Aurora they had seems alarming; an alarm that strongly implies "we didn't use the right system for this problem".

My guess for "why didn't they use something off the shelf" is that no existing software would be satisfied with the tradeoffs they made here. Nobody else wants this.




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