The reason this feels non-obvious is that people like to think that they're choosing a variable number of small slices of a big datacenter, scaling up and down hour-by-hour or minute-by-minute to get maximum efficiency.

Really, though, you're generating enormous overhead while turning on and off small slices of a 128-core monster with a terabyte of RAM.

That's not the only difference - there are many more facets of reliability guarantees than the brief hand-waving this author does about it in the article.

(i work at motherduck)

over my career i’ve seen countless cases where the complexity of a distributed system introduces as many (or more) reliability concerns as it solves. when everything works well, it can be beautiful. but when things go wrong, they can quickly become a cascading mess of hard-to-debug issues.

FYI, this is from the MotherDuck blog. MotherDuck and DuckDB have a partnership, but they are separate entities.

> DuckDB Labs from its inception has received many investment offers from venture capitalists, but eventually decided not to take venture capital, and rather opted for a business model where it works with a few important partners. “We look forward to the continued growth and adoption that partnering with MotherDuck will bring. Thanks to the MotherDuck team, we are able to focus our efforts on independent innovation of the DuckDB core platform and growth of the open-source community.” says Mühleisen, who currently combines a tenured research position at CWI with the role of CEO at DuckDB Labs.

https://www.cwi.nl/en/news/cwi-spin-off-duckdb-labs-partners...

https://duckdblabs.com/news/2022/11/15/motherduck-partnershi...

https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/news/2525272...