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We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

gds.blog.gov.uk

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Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#41

Post by arpinum »

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

The blogpost shows a connection string to eu-west-1 in Ireland

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#42

Post by Topgamer7 »

We tried to work with DMS to migrate mysql to postgres, and it was a nightmare. Support was useless, and would often just not get back to us without prodding. Then them giving us canned responses unrelated to our queries. The whole thing is nigh on un-debuggable.

Stay away.

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#43

Post by willsmith72 »

bboygravity wrote: post #28
kunwon1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

you want every government to build their own cloud? what in the world? the whole world is interlinked, should they also manufacture their own government laptops in the UK?

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#44

Post by _joel »

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.

There's an absolute ton of stuff on AWS. There used to be gCloud that allowed for smaller clouds to tender for government contracts bit there was a big pull to AWS, at least from my experience with it.

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#45

Post by ris »

bboygravity wrote: post #28
kunwon1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

I don't think you have any idea just how much it costs to run infrastructure at the reliability levels provided by AWS, and just how much investment it would require to get the ball rolling on this.

A lot of people have a very unrealistic picture of what government budgets are like.

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#47

Post by ris »

_xnmw wrote: post #30

Now all we need is for Amazon to come out with a "government-as-a-service" product for your budding nation state.

FWIW GOV.UK Notify is part of a suite of services offered by GDS to UK public sector bodies (along with GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK PaaS) that was originally known as "Government As A Platform".

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#48

Post by swozey »

robertlagrant wrote: post #32
swozey wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They wouldn't need that. And having been SC cleared in the UK, and known a few DV-cleared ones, at least in the UK they don't care if you've smoked pot. They just care that if you have, that you don't mind your family knowing one day. They don't want people who can be blackmailed.

Here it's like this: Don't ever lie to them, "no matter what it is they'll find out."

So, some people don't lie, say they smoked pot in high school and none of them make it to the next step.

I had a twitter convo last year or pre-x whenever with the CTO of some org I can't remember (I don't think centcom, something much smaller) and he mentioned that they've lightened up quite a bit, or at least his program which was a softwar engineering group was more lenient. He was looking for engineers on via twitter on his official account.

So maybe that's loosening up here thankfully.

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#49

Post by rjh29 »

Topgamer7 wrote: post #42

We tried to work with DMS to migrate mysql to postgres, and it was a nightmare. Support was useless, and would often just not get back to us without prodding. Then them giving us canned responses unrelated to our queries. The whole thing is nigh on un-debuggable. Stay away.

Tried it for mysql and it was flat out broken and silently corrupted data.

Re: We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime

#50

Post by mey »

Topgamer7 wrote: post #42

We tried to work with DMS to migrate mysql to postgres, and it was a nightmare. Support was useless, and would often just not get back to us without prodding. Then them giving us canned responses unrelated to our queries. The whole thing is nigh on un-debuggable. Stay away.

I worked on migrating our MySQL system to PostgreSQL using pgloader ( https://pgloader.io/ ).

There were some hiccups, things that needed clarification in documentation, and some additional processes that needed to be done outside of the system to get everything we need in place, it was a amazing help. Not sure the project would've been possible without it.

Data mapping from PostgreSQL to PostgreSQL as in the article isn't nearly as bad as going between systems. We took a full extended outage and didn't preload any data. There were many dry runs before hand and validation before hand, but the system wasn't so mission critical that we couldn't afford to shutoff the system for a couple of hours.

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