In a recent blog post, Dan McKinley explains “Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy“. In short, the usefulness of using MongoDB in addition to their existing MySQL didn’t justify the additional operational complexity of managing another infrastructure service.
This highlights the least appreciated benefit of PaaS: PaaS lets you pick the right tool for the job, without having to worry about the additional operational complexity.
I tried to explain this a year ago in this InfoQ article. But the title was cringe-worthy and the article was too long.
So this blog will be short. I even made the main point bold; and put it in the title.