- This is core to their platform, makes sense to fit it closely to their use cases
- They didn't need most of what a full database offers - they're "just" logging
- They know the tradeoffs and designed appropriately to accept those to keep costs down
I'm a big believer in building on top of the solved problems in the world, but it's also completely okay to build shit. That used to be what this industry did, and now it seems to have shifted in the direction of like 5-10% of large players invent shit and open source it, and the other 90-95% are just stitching together things they didn't build in infrastructure that they don't own or operate, to produce the latest CRUD app. And hell, that's not bad either, it's pretty much my job. But it's also occasionally nice to see someone build to their spec and save a few dollars. It's a good reminder that costs matter, particularly when money isn't free and incinerating endless piles of it chasing a (successful) public exit is no longer the norm.
I get the arguments that developer time isn't free, but neither is running AWS managed services, despite the name. And they didn't really build a general purpose database, they built a much simpler logger for their use case to replace a database. I'd be surprised if they hired someone additional to build this, and if they did, I'd guess (knowing absolutely nothing) that the added dev spends 80% of their time doing other things. It's not like they launched a datacenter. They just built the software and run it on cheaper AWS services versus paying AWS extra for the more complex product.
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