Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Go ahead, self-host Postgres

pierce.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 407 posts

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#221

Post by flomo »

Nextgrid wrote: post #176
flomo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they just paid half of the markup they currently pay for the cloud I'm sure they'll be swimming in qualified candidates.

For companies not heavily into tech, lots of this stuff is not that expensive. Again, how many DBAs are even looking for a 3 hr/month sidegig?

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#222

Post by 999900000999 »

I've had to set up postgres manually ( before docker TBF) and it's best described as suffering.

Things will go wrong. And it's all your fault. You can't just blame AWS.

Also are we changing the definition of self hosting. Self hosting on Digital Ocean ?!

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#223

Post by lbrito »

indigodaddy wrote: post #120
lbrito wrote: post #115

I'm probably just an idiot, but I ran unmanaged postgres on Fly.io, which is basically self hosting on a vm, and it wasn't fun. I did this for just under two years, and I've lost count of how many times one or more of the nodes went down and I had to manually deregister it from the cluster with repmgr, clone a new vm and promote a healthy node to primary. I ended up writing an internal wiki page with the steps. I nev…

Assuming you are using fly's managed postgres now?

Yep

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#224

Post by fabian2k »

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.

For this kind of small scale setup, a reasonable backup strategy is all you need for that. The one critical part is that you actually verify your backups are done and work.

Hardware doesn't fail that often. A single server will easily run many years without any issues, if you are not unlucky. And many smaller setups can tolerate the downtime to rent a new server or VM and restore from backup.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#225

Post by tempest_ »

jknoepfler wrote: post #33
heipei wrote: post #15

I still don't get how folks can hype Postgres with every second post on HN, yet there is no simple batteries-included way to run a HA Postgres cluster with automatic failover like you can do with MongoDB. I'm genuinely curious how people deal with this in production when they're self-hosting.

I use Patroni for that in a k8s environment (although it works anywhere). I get an off-the-shelf declarative deployment of an HA postgres cluster with automatic failover with a little boiler-plate YAML. Patroni has been around for awhile. The database-as-a-service team where I work uses it under the hood. I used it to build database-as-a-service functionality on the infra platform team I was at prior to that. It's ba…

We use patroni and run it outside of k8s on prem, no issues in 6 or 7 years. Just upgraded from pg 12 to 17 with basically no down time without issue either.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#226

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

madeofpalk wrote: post #182
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…

> but it allows me to say, "we'll have to wait until they've sorted this out, Ikea and Disney are down, too." From my experience your client’s clients don’t care about this when they’re still otherwise up.

Yes but the fact that it's "not their fault" keeps the person from getting fired.

Don't underestimate the power of CYA

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#227

Post by nemothekid »

belorn wrote: post #219
nemothekid wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

You can outsource everything, but outsourcing critical parts of the company may also put the existence of the company in the hand of a third-party. Is that an acceptable risk? Control and risk management cost money, be that by self hosting or contracts. At some point it is cheaper to buy the competence and make it part of the company rather than outsource it.

I think you and I simply disagree about your database being a core/critical part of your stack. I believe RDS is good enough for most people, and the only advantage you would have in self hosting is shaving 33% off your instance bill. I'd probably go a step further and argue that Neon/CockroachDB Serverless is good enough for most people.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#228

Post by groundzeros2015 »

kachapopopow wrote: post #93

since this is on the front page (again?) I guess I'll chime in: learn kubernetes - it's worth it. It did take me 3 attempts at it to finally wrap my head around it I really suggest trying out many different things and see what works for you. And I really recommend starting with *default* k3s, do not look at any alternatives to cni, csi, networked storage - treat your first cluster as something that can spontaniously…

Are you working on websites with millions of hourly visits?

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#229

Post by groundzeros2015 »

heipei wrote: post #15

I still don't get how folks can hype Postgres with every second post on HN, yet there is no simple batteries-included way to run a HA Postgres cluster with automatic failover like you can do with MongoDB. I'm genuinely curious how people deal with this in production when they're self-hosting.

Because that’s an expensive and complex boondoggle almost no business needs.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#230

Post by groundzeros2015 »

devin wrote: post #212

What irks me about so many comments in this thread is that they often totally ignore questions of scale, the shape of your workloads, staffing concerns, time constraints, stage of your business, whether you require extensions, etc. There is a whole raft of reasons why you might be a candidate for self-hosting, and a whole raft of reasons why not. This article is deeply reductive, and so are many of the comments.

Engineers almost never consider any of those questions. And instead deploy the maximally expensive solution their boss will say ok to.
Post reply on HN