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Go ahead, self-host Postgres

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Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#151

Post by paulryanrogers »

danaris wrote: post #88
paulryanrogers wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Maria has fallen behind MySQL. I wouldn't chose it for anything my income depends on. (I do use Maria at home for legacy reasons, and have used MySQL and Pg professionally for years.)

> IMO Maria has fallen behind MySQL. I wouldn't chose it for anything my income depends on. Can you give any details on that? I switched to MariaDB back in the day for my personal projects because (so far as I could tell) it was being updated more regularly, and it was more fully open source. (I don't recall offhand at this point whether MySQL switched to a fully paid model, or just less-open.)

IME MariaDB doesn't recover or run as reliably as modern versions of MySQL, at least with InnoDB.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#152

Post by paulryanrogers »

notaseojh wrote: post #21
paulryanrogers wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RDS provides some HA. HAProxy or PGBouncer can help when self hosting.

it's easy to through names out like this (pgbackrest is also useful...) but getting them setup properly in a production environment is not at all straightforward, which I think is the point.

Yeah my hope is that the core team will adopt a built in solution, much as they finally came around on including logical replication.

Until then it is nice to have options, even if they do require extra steps.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#153

Post by jama211 »

zbentley wrote: post #135
jbverschoor wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I agree.. better outsource product development, management, and everything else too by that narrative

That’s pretty reductive. By that logic the opposite extreme is just as true: if using managed services is just as bad as outsourcing everything else, then a business shouldn’t rent real estate either—every business should build and own their own facility. They should also never contract out janitorial work, nor should they retain outside law firms—they should hire and staff those departments internally, every time, n…

So well said, I like the technique of taking their logic and turning it around, never seen that before but it’s smart.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#154

Post by spiralpolitik »

Nextgrid wrote: post #42
molf wrote: post #36

> I'd argue self-hosting is the right choice for basically everyone, with the few exceptions at both ends of the extreme: > If you're just starting out in software & want to get something working quickly with vibe coding, it's easier to treat Postgres as just another remote API that you can call from your single deployed app > If you're a really big company and are reaching the scale where you need trained database e…

> employing engineers to manage self-hosted databases is more cost effective than outsourcing Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers to deal with its complexity. The "cloud" reducing staff costs is and was always a lie. PaaS platforms (Heroku, Render, Railway) can legitimately be operated by your average dev and not have to hire a dedicated person; those cost even mo…

In-house vs Cloud Provider is largely a wash in terms of cost. Regardless of the approach, you are going need people to maintain stuff and people cost money. Similarly compute and storage cost money so what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts.

In my experience you typically need less people if using a Cloud Provider than in-house (or the same number of people can handle more instances) due to increased leverage. Whether you can maximize what you get via leverage depends on how good your team is.

US companies typically like to minimize headcount (either through accounting tricks or outsourcing) so usually using a Cloud Provider wins out for this reason alone. It's not how much money you spend, it's how it looks on the balance sheet ;)

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#156

Post by slroger »

Great read. I moved my video sharing app from GCP to self hosted on a beefy home server+ cloudflare for object storage and video streaming. Had been using Cloud SQL as my managed db and now running Postgres on my own dedicated hardware. I was forced to move away from the cloud primarily because of the high cost of running video processing(not because Cloud SQL was bad) but instead have discovered self hosting the db isnt as difficult as its made out to be. And there was a daily charge of keeping the DB hot which I dont have now. Will be moving to a rackmount server at a datacolo in about a month so this was great to read and confirms my experience.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#157

Post by flomo »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #72
molf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers Every company beyond a particular size surely? For many small and medium sized companies hiring an infrastructure team makes just as little sense as hiring kitchen staff to make lunch.

You're paying people to do the role either way, if it's not dedicated staff then it's taking time away from your application developers so they can play the role of underqualified architects, sysadmins, security engineers.

Yeah, and nobody is looking at the other side of this. There just are not a lot of good DBA/sysop type who even want to work for some non-tech SMB. So this either gets outsourced to the cloud, or some junior dev or desktop support guy hacks it together. And then who knows if the backups are even working.

Fact is a lot of these companies are on the cloud because their internal IT was a total fail.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#158

Post by awestroke »

satvikpendem wrote: post #150
awestroke wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You're saying RDS backups can't be trusted?

Trusted in what sense, that they'll always work perfectly 100% of the time? No, therefore one must still check them from time to time, and it's really no different when self hosting, again, if you do it correctly.

What are some common ways that RDS backups fail to be restored?

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#159

Post by satvikpendem »

awestroke wrote: post #158
satvikpendem wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trusted in what sense, that they'll always work perfectly 100% of the time? No, therefore one must still check them from time to time, and it's really no different when self hosting, again, if you do it correctly.

What are some common ways that RDS backups fail to be restored?

Why are you asking me this? Are you trying to test whether I've actually used RDS before? I'm sure a quick search will find you the answer to your question.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#160

Post by paulryanrogers »

mattmanser wrote: post #136
mittermayr wrote: post #116

Self-hosting is more a question of responsibility I'd say. I am running a couple of SaaS products and self-host at much better performance at a fraction of the cost of running this on AWS. It's amazing and it works perfectly fine. For client projects, however, I always try and sell them on paying the AWS fees, simply because it shifts the responsibility of the hardware being "up" to someone else. It does not inherent…

Over 20 year I've had lots of clients on self-hosted, even self-hosting SQL on the same VM as the webserver as you used to in the long distant past for low-usage web apps. I have never, ever, ever had a SQL box go down. I've had a web server go down once. I had someone who probably shouldn't have had access to a server accidentally turn one off once. The only major outage I've had (2/3 hours) was when the box was als…

Disks go bad. RAID is nontrivial to set up. Hetzner had a big DC outage that lead to data loss.

Off site backups or replication would help, though not always trivial to fail over.

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