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Go ahead, self-host Postgres

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Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#191

Post by Nextgrid »

empthought wrote: post #99
bradley13 wrote: post #45

Huh? Maybe I missed something, but...why should self-hosting a database server be hard or scary? Sure, you are then responsible for security backups, etc...but that's not really different in the cloud - if anything, the cloud makes it more complicated.

Self-hosting a database server is not particularly hard or scary for an engineer. Hiring and replacing engineers who can and want to manage database servers can be hard or scary for employers.

> Hiring and replacing engineers who can and want to manage database servers can be hard or scary for employers.

I heard there's this magical thing called "money" that is claimed to help with this problem. You offer even half of the AWS markup to your employees and suddenly they like managing database servers. Magic I tell you!

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#192

Post by pinkgolem »

scott_w wrote: post #186
pinkgolem wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was work you spend configuring those services and keeping them alive? I am genuinely curious... We have a very limited set of services, but most have been very painless to maintain.

A Django+Celery app behind Nginx back in the day. Most maintenance would be discovering a new failure mode: - certificates not being renewed in time - Celery eating up all RAM and having to be recycled - RabbitMQ getting blocked requiring a forced restart - random issues with Postgres that usually required a hard restart of PG (running low on RAM maybe?) - configs having issues - running out of inodes - DNS not updat…

I mean, going back a decade might be part of the reason?

Configs having issues is like number 1 reason i like the setup so much..

I can configure everything on my local machine and test here, and then just deploy it to a server the same way.

I do not have to build a local setup, and then a remote one

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#193

Post by Nextgrid »

notaseojh wrote: post #31

Another thread where I can't determine whether the "it's easy" suggestions are from people who are clueless or expert.

Ironically you need a bit of both. You need to be expert enough to make it work, but not "too" expert to be stuck in your ways and/or influenced by all the fear-mongering.

An expert will give you thousands of theoretical reasons why self-hosting the DB is a bad idea.

An "expert" will host it, enjoy the cost savings and deal with the once-a-year occurrence of the theoretical risk (if it ever occurs).

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#194

Post by andersmurphy »

alemanek wrote: post #174
paulryanrogers wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who has set this up while not being a DBA or sysadmin. Replication and backups really aren’t that difficult to setup properly with something like Postgres. You can also expose metrics around this to setup alerting if replication lag goes beyond a threshold you set or a backup didn’t complete. You do need to periodically test your backups but that is also good practice. I am not saying something like RDS do…

Even easier with sqlite thanks to litestream.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#195

Post by nemothekid »

jbverschoor wrote: post #129
bossyTeacher wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 is. You need to answer the question: what are the consecuences of your service being down for lets say 4 hours or some security patch isn't properly applied or you have not followed the best practices in terms of security? Many…

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

Unironically - I agree. You should be outsourcing things that aren't your core competency. I think many people on this forum have a certain pride about doing this manually, but to me it wouldn't make sense in any other context.

Could you imagine accountants arguing that you shouldn't use a service like Paychex or Gusto and just run payroll manually? After all it's cheaper! Just spend a week tracking taxes, benefits and signing checks.

Self-hosting, to me, doesn't make sense unless you are 1.) doing something not offered by the cloud or a pathological use case 2.) or running a hobby project or 3.) you are in maintaince mode on the product. Otherwise your time is better spent on your core product - and if it isn't, you probably aren't busy enough. If the cost of your RDS cluster is so expensive relative to your traffic, you probably aren't charging enough or your business economics really don't make sense.

I've managed large database clusters (MySQL, Cassandra) on bare metal hardware in managed colo in the past. I'm well aware of the performance thats being left on the table and what the cost difference is. For the vast majority of businesses, optimizing for self hosting doesn't make sense, especially if you don't have PMF. For a company like 37signals, sure, product velocity probably is very high, and you have engineering cycles to spare. But if you aren't profitable, self hosting won't make you profitable, and your time is better spent elsewhere.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#196

Post by chickensong »

zbentley wrote: post #127
runako wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What am I missing? IME the need for 24x7 for B2B apps is largely driven by global customer scope. If you have customers in North American and Asia, now you need 24x7 (and x365 because of little holiday overlap). That being said, there are a number of B2B apps/industries where global scope is not a thing. For example, many providers who operate in the $4.9 trillion US healthcare market do not have any international…

I’ve worked for banks, multiple large and small US healthcare-related companies, and businesses that didn’t use their software when they were closed for the night. All of those places needed their backend systems to be up 24/7. The banks ran reports and cleared funds with nightly batches—hundreds of jobs a night for even small banking networks. The healthcare companies needed to receive claims and process patient upd…

Uptime is also a sales and marketing point, regardless of real-world usage. Business folks in service-providing companies will usually expect high availability by default, only tempered by the cost and reality of more nines.

Also, in addition to perception/reputation issues, B2B contracts typically include an SLA, and nobody wants to be in breach of contract.

I think the parent you're replying to is wrong, because I've worked at small companies selling into large enterprise, and the expectation is basically 24/7 service availability, regardless of industry.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#197

Post by Thaxll »

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…

That argument does not hold when there is aws serverless pg available, which cost almost nothing for low traffic and is vastly superior to self hosting regarding observability, security, integration, backup ect...

There is no reason to self manage pg for dev / environnement.

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#198

Post by j45 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #160
mattmanser wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not as often as you might think. Hardware doesn’t fail like it used to.

Hardware also monitors itself reasonably well because the hosting providers use it.

It’s trivial to run a mirrored containers on two separate proxmox nodes because hosting providers use the same kind of stuff.

Offsite backups and replication? Also point and click and trivial with tools like Proxmox.

RAID is actually trivial to setup.l if you don’t compare it to doing it manually yourself from the command line. Again, tools like Proxmox make it point and click and 5 minutes of watching from YouTube.

If you want to find a solution our brain will find it. If we don’t we can find reasons not to.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#199

Post by jread »

Thaxll wrote: post #197
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…

That argument does not hold when there is aws serverless pg available, which cost almost nothing for low traffic and is vastly superior to self hosting regarding observability, security, integration, backup ect... There is no reason to self manage pg for dev / environnement. https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

This was true for RDS serverless v1 which scaled to 0 but is no longer offered. V2 requires a minimum 0.5 ACU hourly commit ($40+ /mo).

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#200

Post by ninkendo »

vovavili wrote: post #161
ninkendo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $WORK we’ve been using the Zalando Postgres kubernetes operator to great success: https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator As someone who has operated Postgres clusters for over a decade before k8s was even a thing, I fully recommend just using a Postgres operator like this one and moving on. The out of box config is sane, it’s easy to override things, and failover/etc has been working flawlessly for years. It…

For something like a database, what is the added advantage to using Kubernetes as opposed to something simple like Docker Compose?

The assumption is that you’re already using Kubernetes, sorry.

Docker compose has always been great for running some containers on a local machine, but I’ve never found it to be great for deployments with lots of physical nodes. k8s is certainly complex, but the complexity really pays off for larger deployments IMO.

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