> I totally get your reluctance to rely on 3rd party, but the question is more for people who already do rely on 3rd party such as AWS or Azure.

Just a little input: Amazon and Microsoft are well known companies. I (and my superiors) think they can support us. Your company that I haven't heard of is not.

It may be dumb sounding, but I won't get in trouble if I used AWS and something went wrong. How could I have known?

With an unknown company, if something goes wrong, it's on me because I selected that vendor.

Stupid perhaps, but important to understand.

How are you imagining solving latency issues? Many people want their DB to be close to their appservers.

edit: and if it's an hosted service, I'm assuming decent networking options (ipsec et al)?

Exactly. I want my app server and my db server to be as close as possible. That's why services like Compose and ElephantSQL offer just that. So then it comes down to performance/price (value) between RDS and those.

Latency will be higher. We are considering if we do go forward: a) Partnerships with smaller providers where there is an option to colocate equipment b) Colocating as close to as possible to targeted providers.

The main thing we are trying to figure out - if there is a need for service that has significantly higher tears then what Azure, AWS offers.

I would imagine people who need either more AWS can supply (or cheaper) but cannot pay for it, and also haven't figured out how to run it themselves, to be a very limited set. Happy to be proven wrong though and curious about what you will find out :) Is there a way to keep in loop?

The thing that is impractical to do on premise is "transparent scaling" say your load increases and you need a way bigger box that's the kind of problem the service can solve (take slave offline remount storage on a bigger box catchup on replication switch to slave repeat for former master). We are at the early stage just investigating if we should move forward so @andre1sk on twitter would prob the only place :)