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

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

> 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.

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.

It's not all HA, NVMe, web scale stuff, but it's not like a few hundred TB:s is a huge undertaking even for individual nerds with a bit of money to spend or connections at corporations that monotonically decommission hardware and is happy to not have to spend resources getting rid of it.

This summer I bought a used server for 200 euros from an acquaintance, I plan on shoving 140 TB in it and expect some of my future databases to exceed 10 TB in size.