Comment by stevencorona | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevencorona | Hacker News Reader

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Sure.

- No way to upgrade major postgres version without full export and import into new cluster.

- Incredible delay between postgres versions. IIRC, it took nearly 2 years for them to add postgres 11 after it was released.

- HA is basically useless. Costs double, still has 4-5 minute window of downtime as it fails over, doesn't avoid maintenance window downtime (both primary/standby have same maintenance window) and you can't use it as a read replica. Honestly, feels like a borderline scam since I'd imagine a new instance could be spun up in the same amount of time a failover takes (but I haven't tested)

- With default settings, we experience overly aggressive OOM-killer related crashes on a ~monthly basis during periods of high utilization. On a 32GB instance, OOM killer seems to kick in around 27-28GB and it's incredibly annoying.

- Markup over raw instances is almost 100%, with no sustained use discount outside of a yearly commit.

It's just a lot of money to pay for a crashy, outdated version of Postgres.

> Incredible delay between postgres versions

To be fair, it looks like GCP supported Postgres 13 (Nov 5, 2020) before AWS did (Nov 27, 2020) and AWS currently marks Postgres 13 as a preview. Maybe GCP had a large initial engineer-cost to support multiple versions of Postgres and now the incremental cost to add new versions is small?

> It's just a lot of money to pay for a crashy, outdated version of Postgres.

Have you looked at other options? I'm evaluating GCP SQL and the comments in this thread are scary. Seems like Aiven might be a good way to go. I've also briefly looked at CrunchyData's Postgres Operator [1] for Kubernetes but it's a lot of complexity I don't really want.

[1]: https://github.com/CrunchyData/postgres-operator

I’ve only looked at CrunchyData which does seem like more complexity than I want - I was willing to suck it up pay the premium but the monthly OOM crashes have forced my hand - but to where, I don’t know yet

Amazon RDS waits until the "dot-one" release of a new PostgreSQL major version before releasing to general availability. This ensures that all supported extensions and modules (71 in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 13) have been updated to work with the new release and with in-place major version upgrades. Amazon RDS releases beta and "dot-zero" versions of PostgreSQL in the Preview Environment, so that customers can start testing and developing against new features in the latest major version.

I need to run Postgres in production soon. I've used AWS RDS (MySQL) in the past, but am also considering Google Cloud SQL.

Things that seem similar in AWS:

- For major version upgrades, you need to bring up a new instance from a snapshot and catch it up with replication.

- HA failover results in a few minutes of downtime. (They claim using their SQL proxy will reduce this.)

- Lag in providing the latest Postgres versions. GCP seems to be a bit ahead of AWS here.

Is there a managed Postgres offering that you prefer? Aiven looks nice, feature-wise.

To clarify, it’s a lot more work than bringing up a snapshot. You need to do a full export as SQL and reimport as SQL. Super annoying, slow, and requires hard downtime.

Am using SQL proxy but doesn’t do much re: HA.

I don’t know, I’ll probably just run my own Postgres at some point. The only peace of mind that I get from Cloud SQL is the automatic backups.

Why don't they make the upgrade seamless? If it's truly an export/import process, then it should be dead simple for them to do that on their end. Especially after they've snatched your db from serving requests

Interestingly, we don't have any of these problems with MySQL. We have several read-replicas on our DBs and things have been stable.

I will guess that you are much higher scale than us.

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