You've joined a company, or worked there a little while, and you've just now realised that you'll have to do on-call. You feel like you don't know much about how everything fits together, how are you supposed to fix it at 2am when you get paged? So you're a little nervous. Understandable. Here are a few tips to help you become less nervous.

Like all good things in infrastructure, picking whether or not to self-host your database is full of trade-offs. On the one hand, you have the absolute freedom to do whatever it is you want with your database - whether it's adding a useful Postgres extension, or experimenting with new technologies. On the other hand, you now have to dedicate resources to keeping your database reliably online.