Ask HN: Heroku Postgres vs. Amazon RDS Postgres | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Heroku Postgres vs. Amazon RDS Postgres

9 pointsdave16193 comments

I'm currently running a Heroku Rails app and our Postgres DB has grown to a data size of 50GB, and our DB cache hit rate is at 93%. We're on the legacy Ronin ($200/month) plan (1.7GB) and probably need to upgrade but the next upgrade is the 7.5GB plan at ($750/plan). But we're running this as a bootstrap, so we'd like to save some money.

I notice that Amazon RDS for Postgres is in beta and will likely be a lot cheaper. But I'm wondering if anybody has any experience using Amazon RDS for Postgres instead of Heroku Postgres.

We've got a small team so we don't have any resources for DB management, and that's why we like Heroku. I'm wondering if Amazon will also the same convenience and no-maintenance approach as Heroku, and if we'll be saving significant amount of money or not.

Thanks.

I've used Postgres RDS and it was fine. One limitation though is that unlike MySQL RDS, you can't (yet?) configure it for streaming replication. You can tick a checkbox to run a "Multi-AZ" deployment with failover, which I assume uses streaming replication behind-the-scenes, but there is no way to access whatever slave instance AWS is running. So you can't use slave instances for horizontal scaling, only high availability. I haven't looked at Heroku Postgres in a while, so I don't remember whether they offer what AWS doesn't here. It doesn't sound like you're anywhere near the point of scaling to a read-only replica though.

With Postgres RDS is there any extra maintenance required (vs Heroku Postgres)? Or any other limitations besides accessing slave instances?

Back when we first migrated to Postgres, Amazon had not come out with their offering for RDS yet so Heroku was the first place we looked. Unfortunately (at that time), there didn't seem to be a way to launch a Heroku PostgreSQL cluster inside of a VPC, so it was off the table for us. I haven't looked at it since but would be curious to know if that situation has changed, or if the nature of Heroku's infrastructure simply prevents it from being workable.

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