I would never say that self-hosting anything is trivial. Linux administration, tuning, and troubleshooting can be learned, obviously, and the same is true of RDBMS. Neither is a trivial skillset if you want to actually be able to run stuff at scale, though. There's a massive difference between 25 QPS and 25,000 QPS (TFA states ~40 replicas, and an aggregate of 1,000,000 QPS).

That shouldn't deter anyone from trying, though. You can't learn if you don't try.

If managing PostgreSQL were truly trivial, we wouldn’t have had an entire job title - Database Administrator (DBA) - dedicated to it. I don't know if it's still the case but I remember back in the 2000s, DBAs were paid significantly more than regular software developers.

Yeah, that's baffling to me too. I started self-hosting my databases with MySQL 21 years ago, before the cloud even existed.

Before the cloud? More than 21 years ago that damn cloud icon was in every Visio network diagram.

Before that it was on whiteboards.

> Before the cloud?

Yes, the cloud, in the modern sense (as in, on-demand scalable infrastructure like AWS), was just beginning to emerge back then, AWS launched S3 and EC2 in 2006 so 19 years ago. Other cloud services followed over the next several years.

The popularity of the cloud icon in diagrams well precedes the term “cloud computing” being coined for on-demand scalable (usually, but not always, remote-hosted) infrastructure and services that accompanied the explosion of such services in about the mid-00s.

IME folk were saying move it to the cloud, with the meaning of a manged provider, before 2005.