Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, team, gather 'round. Marketing just forwarded me this… inspirational piece about Percona Everest. Let’s all take a moment to appreciate their "clear goal in mind." It’s so heartwarming when a vendor has a goal. My goal is to make payroll without selling the office furniture, but I’m glad they’re focused on delivering a "powerful yet approachable DBaaS experience." It’s a beautiful sentiment. It almost makes you forget their real goal is to get their hands so deep in our pockets they can tickle our ankles.
They say thanks to "strong user and customer adoption," Everest has grown. I love that phrasing. It’s like saying, "Thanks to a lot of fish taking the bait, our fishing boat is now a destroyer." They boast of "thousands of production clusters deployed." That’s a lovely, round, and utterly meaningless number. Is that a thousand clusters running a fantasy football league, or a thousand clusters running the entire global banking system? Because one of those is impressive, and the other is a rounding error in our cloud bill. And the "overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community"? Of course the feedback is positive from the 'community.' They're not the ones signing the checks. Let's see the feedback from the CFOs who've had to approve the unbudgeted line item for "Kubernetes Whisperer" consultants.
Let’s do some real math, shall we? Not their magical ROI math where productivity skyrockets and engineers start spontaneously photosynthesizing code. I mean my back-of-a-napkin-that’s-actually-an-overdue-invoice math.
They’ll pitch us their "approachable" platform for, let’s say, a cool $150,000 a year. A bargain! they'll say. But I’ve been to this rodeo before. I’ve seen the clowns, and I know how much the peanuts cost.
The "Seamless" Migration: First, we have to move our data. Their sales rep, a charming guy named Chad who says synergy a lot, will assure us it's a "simple, one-click process." This "one-click" will somehow require a team of three of our most expensive engineers for six weeks and a $200,000 "Professional Services" engagement with their specialists when it inevitably fails. True Cost: $150k + $200k = $350k.
The "Intuitive" Training: Next, our people have to learn this "approachable" system. That’s another $75,000 for a week of training where our team learns a new dialect of YAML and how to navigate a GUI with 47 different dashboards, none of which show the one metric we actually care about: the cost. True Cost: $350k + $75k = $425k.
The Kubernetes Tax: Oh, and did I mention it’s on Kubernetes? I love Kubernetes. It’s a fantastic technology for turning a simple problem into a complex one that requires hiring an entire new department of people who use the word "observability" in every sentence. Let's be conservative and say the army of consultants and specialized new hires to manage this beast adds another $400,000 a year in operational overhead. True Cost: $425k + $400k = $825k.
So, their "approachable" $150,000 solution actually costs us over eight hundred thousand dollars in the first year alone. That's before we even talk about the egress fees, the mandatory "Enterprise Platinum Support" package we'll need when something breaks at 3 AM on a Tuesday, or the surprise 20% price hike next year because they've been "adding value to the platform." They’re not selling a database service; they’re selling a mortgage.
They talk about adoption? It's not adoption; it's a hostage situation. Once you’re in, the cost to leave—to untangle your entire infrastructure from their proprietary operators and "value-add" APIs—is so high that you’re stuck. They know it. We know it. But they put it in a pretty blog post with words like "community" and "approachable" so we can all pretend we’re not just playing with very, very expensive Monopoly money.
So, thank you, Percona, for your thoughtful post. It was a beautiful work of fiction. But we won’t be deploying your platform. Your DBaaS isn't a "powerful experience"; it's a tastefully designed financial oubliette, and my job is to keep this company out of dungeons.