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Comment by jbrantly | Hacker News Reader

Not that it necessarily should, but the article did not really address why they were moving away from RDS. Was it cost, performance, other issues?

I've been trying to compare RDS for Postgres to other offerings like Compose or Heroku but have come up surprisingly dry on comparisons.

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I'm the decision maker for the company in question - Authentise. It was a combination of cost and the fact that we need to support an in-datacenter install option for our customers. RDS is really great if you need all of the failover and backup options it provides and you don't have the manpower to invest in it. That's how we got our services started. But, as our expertise and automation grew it ended up being a modest cost savings to handle our own backups and redundancies. Primarily, though, we just can't install RDS in someone else's datacenter on premises.

Well done on not being married to AWS. Its usually a costly lesson for those who don't prepare for that earlier in their environment's lifecycle.

Thanks for the background info, very helpful. How has on-prem install gone for you guys ? There was an article on HN yesterday suggesting it was a royal PITA (for ops and support), would be interesting to hear about your experience.

Also FYI, your homepage has a 2015 copyright notice on it. No big deal, but thought you might like to know since it could put off particularly "nit picky" types of customer :)

> Also FYI, your homepage has a 2015 copyright notice on it. No big deal, but thought you might like to know since it could put off particularly "nit picky" types of customer :)

If that's when the work was created, then that's correct. Copyright notices aren't there to tell you what year it is today. They are there to tell you when the work was created. If they change it to 2016 when the work was really created in 2015, then that's an invalid copyright notice and equivalent to no notice at all.

Exactly. I've actually had a manager tell me to update a copyright notice from 2016 to 2015. These are the real nitpickers.

Heard this for the first time, so being really curious (I always have the most recent year in a range on my sites)

What if the page is dynamically created on the fly? What copyright should I have? If page contains snippets/work created in different years?

In my personal comparison, a huge factor for RDS and against Heroku is something that I have never seen mentioned in these comparisons: you can run multiple databases on a single RDS instance and you can't do that with Heroku.

My company has a bunch of microservices that each need a Postgres database, but none of them are particularly high traffic. We do however need high availability guarantees for all of them, and so Heroku's pricing starts at $200/mo per database.

With RDS, we get adequate performance for a similar total cost (around $300/mo), but get to run about a dozen separate high-availability databases on that same instance, each with their own usernames and passwords. That means significant savings.

(of course you could just share a single Heroku Postgres database and user account between these services, perhaps separating them by scheme, but that wasn't really to my taste.)

FYI, the Aiven database service allows you to run multiple database per instance. HA plans for Aiven start at US$200/mo and are available in multiple clouds including AWS and Google, see https://aiven.io/postgresql#comparison

First to hear about Aiven and you guys released pg hoard. Right? Interesting offerings. Are you connected to upcloud? (Both are based in Helsinki from what I could gather)

Yeah, PGHoard is the PG cloud backup solution we initially developed for Aiven and later open sourced. It's now used in a lot of other environments as well.

Aiven services are available on UpCloud and we're friends with the UpCloud people as we're both based in Helsinki and have met at various events, but there's no other connection between the companies.

It's because it's a pretty situational thing to talk about. IMO, the most sensible reasons to move away from RDS would be customer requirements or you're not using AWS for anything else.

What traits are you comparing on? What kind of a thing are you building? What features (cost, performance, ease of use, time) are the most important to you?

Agreed, I always look for the reasoning behind these types of decisions. It helps others understand the issues that people face with different platforms.

OVH is likely to launch a dedicated instance for Postgres in the near future. It's currently in the beta stage of RunAbove.

https://www.runabove.com/PaaSDBPGSQL.xml

No affiliation, just a happy customer of OVH's hardware.

I wrote one up for Codeship earlier this year:

https://blog.codeship.com/heroku-postgresql-versus-amazon-rd...

Cost, performance, size limitations

At what scale have you found Performance and Size Limitations an issue? I've seen people leave due to cost before (not that I thought they were always correct), but not for the other two you listed.

30,000 iops is 1/2 of a crappy consumer grade SSD. 6TB is fairly low for projects that generate any sizable amount of data. We don't run things in AWS unless it's strong client preference.

Not to mention 30k IOPS and 6TB is very expensive.

You're looking at $2700/mo for the IO provisioning and $750/mo for the 6TB of storage. Double those if you want Multi-AZ. Then you get to price the server size which I imagine is one of the more expensive options if you need 30k/6TB.

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