Yes, many times, which is why I've developed this opinion.
> However, at large scales cloud won’t make sense anymore. They do have a markup and eventually what you’re paying in markup could instead buy you a few full time employees.
The issue is once you've finally realized this stuff matters, and have hired a DB team, I can practically guarantee that your schema is a horror show, your queries are hellish, and your product teams have neither the time nor inclination to unwind any of it. Your DB{A,RE}s are going to spend months in hell as they are suddenly made the scapegoats for every performance problem, and are powerless to fix anything, since their proposals require downtime, too much engineering effort, or both.
Hence my statement. Learn enough about this stuff so that when you do hire in specialists, the problems are more manageable.
You need to do things that are appropriate for a small company when you’re a small company. And then if you become a large company you change things to suit your new scale.
All of the troubles you described sound like bad management. I’m sorry if you’ve had to go through that. DBAs that are setting up a replacement are going to need time to do that right and expectations need to be set that this is a tricky problem.
Yes, many times, which is why I've developed this opinion.
> However, at large scales cloud won’t make sense anymore. They do have a markup and eventually what you’re paying in markup could instead buy you a few full time employees.
The issue is once you've finally realized this stuff matters, and have hired a DB team, I can practically guarantee that your schema is a horror show, your queries are hellish, and your product teams have neither the time nor inclination to unwind any of it. Your DB{A,RE}s are going to spend months in hell as they are suddenly made the scapegoats for every performance problem, and are powerless to fix anything, since their proposals require downtime, too much engineering effort, or both.
Hence my statement. Learn enough about this stuff so that when you do hire in specialists, the problems are more manageable.