🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, how wonderful. Another press release about how a vendor has revolutionized the simple act of logging in. Percona is "proud to announce" OIDC support. I’m sure they are. I'd be proud too if I’d just figured out a new way to weave another tentacle into our tech stack. “Simplify,” they say. That’s adorable. Let me translate that from marketing-speak into balance-sheet-speak: “A new and exciting way to complicate our budget.”

They call it an "enterprise-grade MongoDB-compatible database solution." Let’s unpack that masterpiece of corporate poetry, shall we?

• "Enterprise-grade" is a lovely little euphemism for "we've removed the price tag from the website so our sales team can look you in the eye and invent a number based on the perceived desperation in your CTO's voice."
• "MongoDB-compatible" is my personal favorite. It’s the siren song of open-source alternatives. It’s the promise of a cheaper, better life, like a generic brand of cereal that tastes almost the same until you find a weird, unidentifiable lump in your bowl. That lump, my friends, is the inevitable, compatibility-breaking edge case that will cost us a fortune.

They claim we can now integrate with leading identity providers. Fantastic. So, we get to pay Percona for the privilege of integrating with Okta, whom we are also paying, to connect to a database that’s supposed to be saving us money over MongoDB Atlas, whom we are specifically not paying. This isn’t a feature; it’s a subscription daisy chain. It's the human centipede of recurring revenue, and our P&L is stitched firmly to the back.

Let's do some of my famous back-of-the-napkin math on the "true" cost of this free and simple feature, shall we? Let's call it the Total Cost of Delusion.

With this new capability, Percona customers can integrate… to simplify […]

Simplicity, they claim. Right.

• The "Minor" Implementation Project: They make it sound like flipping a switch. I see it as two of our senior DevOps engineers, the ones who cost more per hour than my therapist, locked in a room for three sprints. They’ll be writing custom glue code, wrestling with obscure YAML configurations, and updating documentation that no one will ever read. Let’s generously peg that at $60,000 in fully-loaded salary cost before they’ve even authenticated a single user.
• The Inevitable "Professional Services" Engagement: At some point, that "MongoDB-compatible" promise will fray at the edges. Our shiny new OIDC integration won't work with some critical internal tool. Our engineers will spend a week blaming Okta, Okta will blame Percona, and Percona will say, "Well, for our premium-plus-platinum support tier and a modest professional services engagement, our experts can take a look." Cha-ching. Let's just pencil in a $45,000 "consulting" line item as an insurance policy.
• The Vendor Lock-in Albatross: This is the real masterstroke. By encouraging us to build our entire authentication workflow around their specific implementation of OIDC, they’re not simplifying anything. They’re forging bespoke shackles. The cost to migrate away from Percona in two years won’t just be a data migration. It’ll be a complete re-architecture of our identity and access management. That’s not a technical debt; it’s a leveraged buyout of our own infrastructure. The cost? Let's call it $250,000 and a year of my life I’ll never get back.

So, the "ROI" on this. What are we saving? A few minutes of manually creating database users? Let's be wildly optimistic and say this saves us 10 hours of admin work a year. At a generous blended rate, that's maybe $750.

So, to recap: We're going to spend over $100,000 in the first year alone, plus an unquantifiable future mortgage on our tech stack, all to achieve an annual savings of $750. That's a return on investment of... negative 99.25%. By my calculations, if we adopt three more "features" like this, we can achieve insolvency by Q3 of next year. Our TCO here isn't Total Cost of Ownership; it's Terminal Cost of Operations.

So, thank you, Percona. It’s a very… proud announcement. You’ve successfully engineered a solution to a problem that didn't exist and wrapped it in a business model that would make a loan shark blush. It’s a bold move. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go shred this before our Head of Engineering sees it and gets any bright ideas. Keep up the good work.