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Comment by rafaelmn | Hacker News Reader

To be honest I don't trust myself running a HA PostgreSQL setup with correct backups without spending an exorbitant effort to investigate everything (weeks/months) - do you ? I'm not even sure what effort that would take. I can't remember last time I worked with unmanaged DB in prod where I did not have a dedicated DBA/sysadmin. And I've been doing this for 15 years now. AFAIK Hetzner offers no managed database solution. I know they offer some load balancer so there's that at least.

At some point in the scaling journey bare metal might be the right choice, but I get the feeling a lot of people here trivialize it.

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If youre not Netflix then just sudo yum install postgresql and pg_dump every day, upload to S3. Has worked for me for 20 years at various companies, side projects, startups …

What happens when the server goes down ? How do you update it ?

you stand up another db server and load the last good dump into it i suppose

> If youre not Netflix then just sudo yum install postgresql and pg_dump every day, upload to S3.

database services such as DynamoDB support a few backup strategies out of the box, including continuous backups. You just need to flips switch and never bother about it again.

> Has worked for me for 20 years at various companies, side projects, startups …

That's perfectly fine. There are still developers who don't even use version control at all. Some old habits die hard, even when the whole world moved on.

If it requires weeks/months to sort setting that up and backups then you need a news ops person as that's insane.

If you're doing it yourself, learn Ansible, you'll do it once and be set forever.

You do not need "managed" database services. A managed database is no different from apt install postgesql followed by a scheduled backup.

It genuinely is trivial, people seem to have this impression theres some sort of unique special sauce going on at AWS when there really isn't.

But that's the thing - if I have an ops guy who can cover this then sure it makes sense - but who does at an early stage ? As a semi competent dev I can setup a terraform infra and be relatively safe with RDS. I could maybe figure out how to do it on my own in some time - but I don't know what I don't know - and I don't want to do a weekend production DB outage debugging because I messed up the replication setup or something. Maybe I'm getting old but I just don't have the energy to deal with that :)

Backups with wall-g and recurring pg_dump are indeed trivial. (Modulo S3 outage taking so long that your WAL files fill up the disk and you corrupt the entire database.)

It's the HA part, especially with a high-volume DB that's challenging.

That doesn’t give you high availability; it doesn’t give you monitoring and alerting; it doesn’t give you hardware failure detection and replacement; it doesn’t solve access control or networking…

Managed databases are a lot more than apt install postgresql.

If you're doing it yourself, learn Ansible, you'll do it once and be set forever.

You do not need "managed" database services. A managed database is no different from apt install postgesql followed by a scheduled backup.

Genuinely no disrespect, but these statements really make it seem like you have limited experience building an HA scalable system. And no, you don't need to be Netflix or Amazon to build software at scale, or require high availability.

From your comment, you don't even have the faintest idea of what is the problem domain. No wonder you think you know better.

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