Where were you a year ago. I had to do ha with patroni etcd and pitr with pgbackrest myself.
What I did not see is what will happen if one node dies. What is the procedure to jump start it back. Etcd is a complicated beast...
Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative
41–50 of 53 posts
Re: Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative
#42This looks very very fragile. If all of this works, great job though.
How does it look fragile?
It runs on or depends on so many disparate software packages that each comes with their own versioning strategy, security model, etc.
Usually when you install a package in a linux distro either the distro or the package maintainer of the package you install is responsible to ensure it keeps working (with varying levels of effort depending on distro, support strategy, etc...).
With these sort of amalgamation packages that becomes weird. Nobody is responsible and its built with many parts that never tested new versions in that configuration.
You need to either understand what you run or understand who you delegated that understanding to.
This is true for individual packages and even more for amalgamations like this.
In most of these amalgamations you delegated it to nobody and you don't realize until it breaks and you cannot fix it.
Re: Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative
#43This looks very good, but the marketing copy (the README is written as such) is horrendous.
This HN thread is already full of people saying "this looks brittle", "maintenance nightmare", &c. because the README spends so long trying to convince you that this product is a huge, multifaceted kitchen sink. People want simplicity, noone is looking for a plethora of things they need to run, why would you ever try and sell anything as that?
Most of the "features" they enumerate are either:
- optional pg extensions that are available in normal pg by default
- orchestration software that one might use to deploy HA pg clusters in a distributed / k8s type env anyway (i.e. it's not extra, it's just your underlying infra templates - e.g. Terraform, Patroni, &c.)
The only thing I really see there that is "not-really-needed-kitchen-sink-extras" is the observability stack (grafana, loki, &c.)
Re: Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until AGPL3 is tested on court I'll keep avoiding it for my day job. While I appreciate the idea, I'd rather not risk my livelihood. My employers do contribute (however modestly) to FOSS, though typically MIT licensed.
What test do you want to see in court? Is it due to concern of the virality of the license infecting software that uses it? Or due to concern that the license doesn't actually protect what it claims to and would be found unenforceable by the court?
Whether or not AGPL3 software will virally infect an entire service of which it constitutes one part.
Re: Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative
#45This is cool and I applaud the effort but basically no one should use this.
Most folks should use RDS etc. (Yes, it's expensive and has limitations.)
If you need or want to self-host, you need to understand every moving part and how they fit together. The effort and knowledge required to assemble your own setup are essential, and outsourcing them to a magic bundle would be a mistake.
Re: Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative
#46I'm so confused, what's the role of Redis here? , looks like a "special case" of running redis instead of pg?
Re: Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative
#47> Free RDS Alternative
RDS is a managed service. This is a code repo. It is useless until you deploy it at which point... it's no longer free. Then you have to manage it yourself and deal with the overhead yourself.
This is like saying I can fire my gardener because you have a free gardener alternative, and then handing me a pair of scissors. I now have all the problems that I paid the Gardener to solve.
Likewise, we pay AWS to manage all the headaches that deploying this would introduce. And trust me, if you are running databases at scale in production, then RDS feels very affordable considering the problems it solves.
Re: Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative
#48So what’s the difference between this and me just running postgres in a docker container and enabling these extensions?
You don't need to rebuild the docker image and restart the container to get the extension installed & created.
And, I haven't found any Postgres docker image with all the extensions I need: you can reuse the RPM in dockerfile to build your own image, which always has to be done somewhere.
Re: Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative
#49I'm so confused, what's the role of Redis here? , looks like a "special case" of running redis instead of pg?
Redis is more like a cherry on top. Many applications utilizing PostgreSQL also employ Redis, Gitlab being a notable example, and that includes us as well. Supporting Redis merely involves adding a couple of RPMs and Playbooks, so why not go for it ;)?
Re: Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative
#50Interesting, but unless you understand every piece of software running and how they interact and are deployed, running this sounds like a devops and security nightmare.
It might require a bit of elbow grease to grasp every component. I'm trying my best to smooth out that learning curve:
https://doc.pigsty.cc/#/PGSQL-ARCH?id=component-overview https://doc.pigsty.cc/#/PGSQL-ADMIN https://doc.pigsty.cc/#/SECURITY https://doc.pigsty.cc/#/ARCH
However, when it comes to getting it up & running, the process is pretty straightforward, and the outcome is leagues ahead compared to running the kernel in the raw way.