The database is corrupted, what do we do?

He came sheepishly to me and told me he corrupted our Postgresql database, what do we do now?

Ok, time to backtrack. A while ago, we built Kloudsec, a CDN product with a vision of the CDN operating as an operating system on the edge, not unlike what Cloudflare is doing now. And we amasssed thousands of users, and we had thousands of sites live on our CDN. Then the database got corrupted. What did we do?

So I made the call to shutdown Kloudsec. We were on a track to burn a lot of money because while Kloudsec had a ton of users, we had no revenue. I posted a goodbye message on our website and then proceeded with closure.

I learnt a lot of lesson building (and shutting down Kloudsec), of which you can read more about it in my post-mortem.

But if I were to summarize the one lesson I learnt, it is that a good product does not necessary make a good business. Also, don't trust your backups (always test them).

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