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We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

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Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#21

Post by swozey »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #4
Edwinr95 wrote: post #2

I'm quite negatively surprised that a government service is moving from their own platform to AWS for such an important service.

I don't know what it's like in UK but it may be the case that government has a hard time a{ttract,fford}ing talent to administer everything in house. Not that AWS is great for cost saving but if its between paying 50k/year for cloud services and not being able to find an engineer who will competently do the job for less than 50k, then the cloud is your only move really.

They require various clearances (digging into your life and past relationships to a miserable degree), don't allow someone to have ever smoked pot and pay half or less of what you can make in the pvt sector here (usa).

Everyone I know working FedRAMP jobs is prior military/g-level.

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#22

Post by pmcp »

Edwinr95 wrote: post #2

I'm quite negatively surprised that a government service is moving from their own platform to AWS for such an important service.

As somebody who worked for the European Commission, and a european national government, I agree with your sentiment, but the harsh reality is that government divisions in generally work on a shoe string budget, when it comes to decisions like these. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a “best effort given the circumstances” move.

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#23

Post by dtnewman »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #11
Edwinr95 wrote: post #2

I'm quite negatively surprised that a government service is moving from their own platform to AWS for such an important service.

That sentence was a little confusing. You're not happy that the government is hiring experts to run an important service?

Yes. RDS is a very reasonable choice if you are a tech company, let alone a govt org. The alternative isn’t “let’s host this ourselves” it is “let’s host this with Oracle at a much higher cost”.

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#24

Post by dijit »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #13
conception wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS has a lot of pre-audited compliance built into their services. Being able to inherit their certification for services can save an organization a lot of time and effort.

Its not an organisation, its a blucking government, it handles citizen data, and its sending them to a company of foreign country, because it can’t hire some system administrators? A GOVERNMENT? What are they doing? Still looking for their product market fit and can’t afford the headcount? Is it a joke? EDIT If they are looking for money id like to participate a bit in the seed round

Sysadmins are cheaper than many people seem to think.

I had a person I trust a lot telling me that "if we go with a bare metal provider like GCore we'd have to hire someone", his reason for bringing that up was that the cost difference would be justified by not having to hire someone,.

However a GCore €400,000k/y bill becomes a €6,000,000~ if you were to use a public cloud, even with the scaling up and down when not in use (we are an extreme case of needing a lot of dumb unreliable compute thats geographically distributed).

I can hire a lot of sysadmins for that money, but I probably don't even need one because public clouds also need devops staff to manage the complexity anyway.

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#25

Post by btown »

mbb70 wrote: post #12

Interesting to compare this to https://knock.app/blog/zero-downtime-postgres-upgrades discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616181 A lot of the discussion boiled down to 'this is a lot of complexity to avoid a few minutes of downtime'. I guess this is the proof, just use AWS Data Migration Service, swap the DNS entries to go live and live with 11 seconds of downtime.

Has anyone used https://cloud.google.com/database-migration/docs/postgres/qu... to do something like this? Does it work similarly to AWS DMS?

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#26

Post by dijit »

freedomben wrote: post #17
sph wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you feel if the US government ran on servers from a European company, which also works very hard to avoid paying taxes in US soil? All those reasons to go AWS hold for a private company, not for a government service of a first world country and G7 member. AWS has a lot of compliant services, but it's not like they're doing rocket science one of the top 5 richest countries in the world cannot afford to devel…

I would be surprised if they aren't deploying to the London data center, so I would think it is within the UK

There's no govcloud in the UK; unless there are specific terms then the terms-of-service state that you are licensing either the irish entity or the american entity to have access and dominion of your data.

I had to spend a lot of time writing my privacy policy (perks of being CTO... yay), and part of that privacy policy was an admission that we transfer ownership of data to a US company (by using public cloud) despite using european datacenters.

This is because our agreement is with a US entity.

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#28

Post by bboygravity »

kunwon1 wrote: post #16
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not an organisation, its a blucking government, it handles citizen data, and its sending them to a company of foreign country, because it can’t hire some system administrators? A GOVERNMENT? What are they doing? Still looking for their product market fit and can’t afford the headcount? Is it a joke? EDIT If they are looking for money id like to participate a bit in the seed round

AWS has a G-Cloud for UK just like they have one for US, no?

Why can't the UK government build there own cloud?

It's just completely insane to me that they would make the gov internet infrastructure completely (geopolitically) dependent on another country AND just literally give all their (citizens') data away AND pay for that "privilege"?!

I mean if the government can't host the government's websites using tech from the government's country, maybe it would be better to just forget about the whole cyberweb thing altogether? Just turn it off?

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#29

Post by belter »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #13
conception wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS has a lot of pre-audited compliance built into their services. Being able to inherit their certification for services can save an organization a lot of time and effort.

Its not an organisation, its a blucking government, it handles citizen data, and its sending them to a company of foreign country, because it can’t hire some system administrators? A GOVERNMENT? What are they doing? Still looking for their product market fit and can’t afford the headcount? Is it a joke? EDIT If they are looking for money id like to participate a bit in the seed round

If you are worried about that, start with your government use of Microsoft Office and Windows who both send MB of data per minute to a US based company.
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