Comment by koito17

12TB is $960/month in gp3 storage alone. You can buy 12TB of NVMe storage for less than $960, and it will be orders of magnitude faster than AWS.

Your use case is the _worst_ use case for the cloud.

First of all, if you have a dev DB that’s 12 TB, I can practically guarantee that it is tremendously unoptimized.

But also, that’s extremely easily handled with physical servers - there are NVMe drives that are 10x as large.

> Just one of the couple dozen databases we run for our product in the dev environment alone is over 12 TB.

> How could I not use the cloud?

Funnily enough, one of my side projects has its (processed) primary source of truth at that exact size. Updates itself automatically every night adding a further ~18-25 million rows. Big but not _big_ data, right?

Anyway, that's sitting running happily with instant access times (yay solid DB background) on a dedicated OVH server that's somewhere around £600/mo (+VAT) and shared with a few other projects. OVH's virtual rack tech is pretty amazing too, replicating that kind of size on the internal network is trivial too.

https://www.seagate.com/products/enterprise-drives/exos/exos...

12 TB fits entirely into the RAM of a 2U server (cf. Dell PowerEdge R840).

However, I think there's an implicit point in TFA; namely, that your personal and side projects are not scaling to a 12 TB database.

With that said, I do manage approximately 14 TB of storage in a RAIDZ2 at my home, for "Linux ISOs". The I/O performance is "good enough" for streaming video and BitTorrent seeding.

However, I am not sure what your latency requirements and access patterns are. If you are mostly reading from the 12 TB database and don't have specific latency requirements on writes, then I don't see why the cloud is a hard requirement? To the contrary, most cloud providers provide remarkably low IOPS in their block storage offerings. Here is an example of Oracle Cloud's block storage for 12 TB:

  Max Throughput: 480 MB/s
  Max IOPS: 25,000

Those are the kind of numbers I would expect of a budget SATA SSD, not "NVMe-based storage infrastructure". Additionally, the cost for 12 TB in this storage class is ~$500/mo. That's roughly the cost of two 14 TB hard drives in a mirror vdev on ZFS (not that this is a good idea btw).

This leads me to guess most people will prefer a managed database offering rather than deploying their own database on top of a cloud provider's block storage. But 12 TB of data in the gp3 storage class of RDS costs about $1,400/mo. That is already triple the cost of the NAS in my bedroom.

Lastly, backing up 12 TB to Backblaze B2 is about $180/mo. Given that this database is for your dev environment, I am assuming that backup requirements are simple (i.e. 1 off-site backup).

The key point, however, is that most people's side projects are unlikely to scale to a 12 TB dev environment database.

Once you're at that scale, sure, consider the cloud. But even at the largest company I worked at, a 14 TB hard drive was enough storage (and IOPS) for on-prem installs of the product. The product was an NLP-based application that automated due diligence for M&As. The storage costs were mostly full-text search indices on collections of tens of thousands of legal documents, each document could span hundreds to thousands of pages. The backups were as simple as having a second 14 TB hard drive around and periodically checking the data isn't corrupt.

Sounds more like your use case is like the 1~2% of the cases a simple server and sqlite is maybe not the correct answer.

12 TB is easy. https://yourdatafitsinram.net/

Buy a pretty basic HDD? These days 12 TB isn’t all that much?

What's your cloud bill?

what are you doing that you have 12TB in dev??? my startup isn't even using a TB in production and we hands multiple millions of dollars in transactions every month.