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Comment by wasd | Hacker News Reader

I'm fairly impressed by RDS's turn around time. 9.6 dropped in late September and they're already supporting it in just over a month. I wish Google Cloud SQL supported Postgres at all. Sad that there's limited competition in managed postgres space (most notable competitor being Heroku).

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Yeah Google Cloud SQL's lack of Postgres support really stings. Would be great to see them branch out a bit.

I suppose they have more experience with MySQL given that Youtube runs on it...

It looks like it's pretty clear recently that Postgres support in some form from Google is coming - https://code.google.com/p/googlecloudsql/issues/detail?id=96

Umm... the only signal on that issue is that it got changed to "accepted" recently without any comment about ETA. I've seen issues sit in that state for quite some time, so that doesn't look all that encouraging or clear to me.

That said, thanks for the link; I've voted for it and will keep an eye out there for future updates.

Meanwhile, SQL Server on RDS doesn't support increasing the data allocation. You can't even take a snapshot and restore to a new, larger, RDS instance. Oh and by the way, SQL Server has been "supported" since 2012.

Obviously it's not their focus, but this is a fundamental selling point to cloud DB's.

That's pretty lame. Do you happen to know if you can you create an AAG with a larger volume on the replica and cut it over? I don't even remember if that's possible with your own SQL Server AAG, it's been a while. At any rate, thanks for commenting about this. I'm going to need to look into this at some point in the near future so your timing was fortuitous.

In short, I don't know. However, I highly doubt it. Most of these features/permissions are disabled when you use RDS. For example you can't take a snapshot through SSMS, you have to use the AWS console.

I'm assuming MS SQL? Isn't much cheaper to run it on an instance yourself if you have company licenses? And I suspect people who don't already have licenses run postgres or mysql.

Yep, MS SQL Server. I think that's something you have to determine on a case-by-case basis. If you have Software Assurance you can run it on any instance but if you don't you have to pay Amazon for dedicated hardware. As usual Microsoft's enterprise licensing is pretty much shit. You might also incur more operations overhead than you can afford by having to deal with patching, outages, performance degradation, etc. And your management might want to engage in a slide deck circle jerk with animations about how modern and in the cloud you are by using RDS so that's worth throwing a few $30K+SA enterprise proc licenses away.

We had this issue. Luckily they recently added native backups to s3 so we had 3 hours of downtime to backup a 180gb db and restore to a new 500gb instance.

Jesus. I'm no strategy genius but sometimes it seems like they want to cede the Windows market to Azure. Some of the Windows stuff in AWS seems kind of "me too".

Is the windows server market with fighting for? Ms makes the most profit no matter who runs the hardware.

That's a fair point. And if it really came down to it they could (and arguably do with things like SQL server) make the licensing terms less agreeable for other cloud operators.

Boy do I wish they had the same turnaround time on AWS Lambda Python versions. Still stuck on 2.7 :(

At least you have a supported language! (Ruby dev)

I managed to run mruby on Lambda. You build the executable on the same Linux distro used by Lambda and you upload it in a zip. Then use node or python to run it. More of a gimmick than of a real thing. Anyway, IMHO given the 100 ms billing units the future for Lambda could be compiled languages, as soon as they'll let us run executables without a node or python wrapper. Maybe the tradeoff between programmer time and runtime costs will be different than for traditional deployments.

There are many options for hosted PostgreSQL.

See for example this staggering list of hosting providers in Europe: https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting/euro...

Yes, most of those are smaller companies. But some of these companies are directly involved in the development of PostgreSQL (just look at the PostgreSQL-hackers mailing list), so they should really know what they are doing!

Do people really talk to databases over WAN (which means relatively high latency)? I was under the impression this was a bad idea.

It depends on the type of application and the requirements and expectations of its users. I wouldn't recommend having a web app talk to its database over a WAN, for example. Unless it had a decent caching layer in between.

Many of the hosting providers provide PG as a service in multiple clouds / hosting providers allowing you to run your applications on your own VMs in the same cloud. So while you would be using the external IP addresses to communicate with the database it'd still be in the same datacenter.

Also, as pointed out in the parent post, some of the hosting providers such as us (Aiven, https://aiven.io) are directly involved in PostgreSQL development and one of the bugfixes in the latest releases (9.6.1 and 9.5.5) that just came out was contributed by us.

Running within the same cloud provider makes sense, I hadn't thought of that.

That's a great point. I've heard of some smaller companies (compose, elephantsql) but to be honest, I have definitely not considered them. The reason is that I just want all inclusive solution and I don't have much context for these companies. How healthy they are, what's the likelyhood of them going out of business, etc.

I think you bring up a good point. I'm going to put aside my bias and give a smaller company a shot. Thanks for sharing.

Compose.io is owned by IBM. I had a chance to meet both the Compose team and a few people from IBM at the DataLayer conference. They are passionate and smart.

Compose is in a sweet spot right now. They run with the speed of a startup, but have access to IBM's massive resources. Really the best of both worlds.

Compose (an IBM company) does managed Postgres.

There are multiple DB-as-a-Service services that provide PostgreSQL in Google Cloud. My company, Aiven (https://aiven.io) is one of the providers and I believe DatabaseLabs and ElephantSQL also provide managed PG in Google Cloud.

My company, Database Labs, runs Postgres as a service in Google Cloud -- https://www.databaselabs.io/pricing/#google-cloud

i wrote about why i thought citus was the best a week ago: http://blog.faraday.io/3-reasons-citus-is-best-non-heroku-po...

Heroku isn't a competitor to AWS, AFAIK. They're a partner.

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean. It used to be the case that Heroku is/was built on EC2. They also offered a managed database (Heroku Postgres) built on EC2. Do you mean they're a partner because they're building a product on top of EC2?

In this context it's useful to note that RDS instance pricing is ~50% higher than the pricing for the underlying EC2 instances. That 50% reflects the (pure software) value-add over EC2.

When someone like Heroku offers a competing product, the fact that the product is also being run on EC2 is only a part of the overall story. Over time, AWS will probably be less and less happy with earning just the bare infrastructure dollars for such use.

> In this context it's useful to note that RDS instance pricing is ~50% higher than the pricing for the underlying EC2 instances. That 50% reflects the (pure software) value-add over EC2.

Just build a HA RDS Cluster yourself with Click and Scale, than you can sell it to me with ~25% higher prices than the EC2 instances. Btw. AWS RDS is cheaper than most other competitors like ElephantSQL.

Just stating a fact about their pricing (in the context of whether Heroku is a competitor or not). Not judging the relative value of the offerings at all. I'm an RDS user, FWIW.

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