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Go ahead, self-host Postgres

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Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#271

Post by antihipocrat »

jama211 wrote: post #153
zbentley wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience it only ends well on the Internet and with philosophically inclined friends.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#272

Post by strken »

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…

I can't talk about staff costs, but as someone who's self-hosted Postgres before, using RDS or Supabase saves weeks of time on upgrades, replicas, tuning, and backups (yeah, you still need independent backups, but PITRs make life easier). Databases and file storage are probably the most useful cloud functionality for small teams.

If you have the luxury of spending half a million per year on infrastructure engineers then you can of course do better, but this is by no means universal or cost-effective.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#273

Post by strken »

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.

Our AWS spend is something like $160/month. Want to come build bare metal database infrastructure for us for $3/day?

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#274

Post by da02 »

franckpachot wrote: post #75
mfalcao wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most common way to achieve HÁ is using Patroni. The easiest way to set it up is using Autobase ( https://autobase.tech ). CloudNativePG ( https://cloudnative-pg.io ) is a great option if you’re using Kubernetes. There’s also pg_auto_failover which is a Postgres extension and a bit less complex than the alternatives, but it has its drawbacks.

Be sure to read the Муths and Truths about Synchronous Replication in PostgreSQL (by the author of Patroni) before considering those solutions as cloud-native high availability: https://www.postgresql.eu/events/pgconfde2025/sessions/sessi...

What is your preferred alternative to Patroni?

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#275

Post by raggi »

I have been self hosting a product on Postgres that serves GIS applications for 20 years and that has been upgraded through all of the various versions during that time. It has a near perfect uptime record modulo two hardware failures and short maintenance periods for final upgrade cutovers. The application has real traffic - the database is bigger than those at my day job.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#276

Post by da02 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #98
gynecologist wrote: post #87

I didnt even know there were companies that would host postgres for you. I self host it for my personal projects with 0 users and it works just fine, so I don't know why anyone would do it any differently.

I can't tell if this is satire or not with the first sentence and the "0 users" parts of your comment, but I know several solo devs with millions of users who self host their database and apps as well.

What hosting providers do they use/recommend?

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#277

Post by AYBABTME »

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…

The fact that as many engineers are on payroll doesn't mean that "cloud" is not an efficiency improvement. When things are easier and cheaper, people don't do less or buy less. They do more and buy more until they fill their capacity. The end result is the same number (or more) of engineers, but they deal with a higher level of abstraction and achieve more with the same headcount.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#278

Post by stickfigure »

runako wrote: post #255
zbentley wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are right that a lot of systems at a lot of places need 24x7. Obviously. But there are also a not-insignificant number of important systems where nobody is on a pager, where there is no call rotation[1]. Computers are much more reliable than they were even 20 years ago. It is an Acceptable Business Choice to not have 24x7 monitoring for some subset of systems. Until very recently[2], Citibank took their public we…

This lasts right up until an important customer can't access your services. Executives don't care about downtime until they have it, then they suddenly care a lot.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#279

Post by jeffbee »

The author's experience is trivial, so it indicates nothing. Anybody can set up a rack of postgresql servers and say it's great in year 2. All the hardware is under warranty and it still works anyway. There haven't been any major releases. The platform software is still "LTS". Nobody has needed to renegotiate the datacenter lease yet. So experience in year 2 tells you nothing.

Re: Go ahead, self-host Postgres

#280

Post by jeffbee »

graemep wrote: post #180
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #11

So, yeah, I guess there's much confusion about what a 'managed database' actually is ? Because for me, the table stakes are: -Backups: the provider will push a full generic disaster-recovery backup of my database to an off-provider location at least daily, without the need for a maintenance window -Optimization: index maintenance and storage optimization are performed automatically and transparently -Multi-datacenter…

Which providers do all of that?

GCP Alloy DB
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