I have a general question about database reliability that perhaps someone could help me look into.<p>I love these Jepsen posts, and Kyle Kingsbury's work is amazing.<p>It all shows that distributed systems are really complicated and difficult to get right. These posts on the open source ones are really great. But how do you go about evaluating a proprietary one?<p>Let's say my company is looking for a columnar store. We look at the evaluation of Cassandra and think, "Nope."<p>But then someone says, "Hey! Let's go with Redshift!" How do you know that's any better?<p>We all know that DB makers claim certain things. Why would Amazon be better at this tricky subject than the people behind ElasticSearch?<p>My question is that I would really like to know what people think about this?<p>Is the decision that it's better to go with the unreliable demon that you know? Or is it better to pass the responsibility off to a company like Amazon, hope for the best, and lawyer up if unexpected things happen?