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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

We are happy with GKE, but have gone from Cloud SQL PostgreSQL back to self-managed PostgreSQL VMs. Cloud SQL is still stuck on version 9.6, and still has no point-in-time recovery ability. It's disappointing because the rest of the GCP offering is pretty well thought out and making rapid progress but Cloud SQL seems not to be getting much love.

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AWS is definitely better for managed PostgreSQL compared to GCE/Azure.

Aurora Postgres is pretty fantastic.

We just switched to Aurora Postgres, and I agree wholeheartedly. The main DB client is a web app with ~4000 txns/second, and we instantly got a ~30% performance boost. We also got much more consistent performance for our slower queries thanks to Aurora's fast, custom storage engine.

> The main DB client is a web app with ~4000 txns/second

curious what is your bill for this

For Aurora we are on a db.r4.8xlarge, which is ~$3340 per month for the instance alone. Aurora also charges for IOPS against storage, and we pay about $350 per month for those IOPS. Our DB is ~400 GB, so ~$40 per month for that as well.

I am pretty sure we could live comfortably on a db.r4.4xlarge, but we have some bursty analytics applications that sometimes bring our load up for about a minute, and we like the peace of mind of headroom during peak hours (we are in edtech with super predictable traffic throughout US school hours).

Total side note: I just went to the pricing page and it looks like they just released db.r5 instances for Aurora (https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/)! It might be time to try those out. I don't see an announcement just yet though...

We have some production PostgreSQL instances running on t2 instances, they are only ~100gb but with the optimized queries we don't exceed CPU credits and the execution time rarely exceeds 200ms. Our requests per second on these are < 50 tho.

They mentioned that there will be some interesting updates next week for Google Next; do you think your feelings might change if they announced support for newer versions and point-in-time recovery?

On a related note, if you have tried it, what do you think of their Cloud SQL MySQL offering?

Not the original commenter, but my team uses CloudSQL MySQL. It's not too bad. It's pretty performant, but we've run into some weird issues surrounding replicas.

As far as I know, MySQL 5.7 is as far as they go and like PostgreSQL, they don't support point-in-time recovery. Also, perplexingly (at least as of a year ago?), deleting the instance deletes all backups associated with it, so there's an opportunity to accidentally blow away all your data. I'm sure Google can recover it, but you'll have to submit a support ticket for that.

Yes, when deleting an instance you can't reuse the same name for a week, so I'm quite sure it is there for at least that amount of time.

At this point I’m reluctant to commit to it without evidence that they’ll keep it up to date. They can upgrade to v11, but how do I know it won’t still be at v11 in 2021?

We don’t use MySQL.

Yeah AWS Aurora does have some nice capabilities compared to Cloud SQL; if it weren’t for the other issues mentioned in the article it would have been a driving factor towards choosing AWS. Still Cloud SQL seems “good enough” in general (other than the somewhat ungraceful way maintenance is handled); I’d be curious to hear if there are particular issues you ran into that made you switch to unmanaged SQL?

Its 2 major versions behind, has limited extensions, and a tight cap on number of connections.

I was surprised when I found out that Cloud SDL doesn't automatically create snapshots before settings changes like Amazon's RDS does.

One time the Postgresql instance got stuck during a migration. There was no way of creating a fresh instance with a recent snapshot. Luckily Google's support team managed to unstuck the instance but that meant 24h of downtime.

Does AWS RDS have point-in-time recovery now? Last I used it a couple years ago it did not

Pretty sure they’ve had PITR (up to 5m ago) for years. It will restore from the latest snapshot and then replay logs to restore the state.

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