AWS Announces Amazon Aurora Supports PostgreSQL 12

51 points by arthurz 4 years ago | 19 comments
  • geoduck14 4 years ago
    I'm just here to say that I took an exam for AWS Solutions Architect last week and I thought Aurora PostgreSQL was a made up service.

    I feel like a fool.

    • iav 4 years ago
      I’ve looked pretty hard at moving my fairly large Postgres RDS to Aurora and the pricing is just very scary. I have a single 100GB instance running on fairly minimal hardware and serving a Django site with 6k monthly visitors. My usage is pretty concentrated during 9-6pm EST as I mainly serve US law firms and investment funds. Any idea if that will end up costing me a fortune to go Aurora? I’m worried about all of those requests in a short amount of time leading to it spinning up a lot of instances.
      • reilly3000 4 years ago
        Aurora's autoscaler is fully in your control. Aurora Serverless is usage-based, but regular Aurora is just an AWS-optimized Postgres distro. You should not receive any surprise billing based on scaling, unless you specifically configure it to do so. Based on those usage patterns you explained you could do a scheduled scaling event that would scale up your Aurora cluster to have more capacity during business hours. If its a read-heavy workload then read replicas are a cheap and easy way to scale.
        • orf 4 years ago
          ‘AWS optimized Postgres distro’ is perhaps underselling it a bit, while being broadly correct. The magic is in the storage engine which powers instantaneous failover, point in time restores and the newly released ‘serverless 2’ product (which would be ideal for the parent has)
          • reilly3000 4 years ago
            You're spot on that Aurora is super-powerful for performance and scaling, giving it characteristics and controls that don't really exist elsewhere. I heard a great talk with their engineering lead about how they optimized Postgres internals to play nicely with S3.

            I still think a small Aurora Postgres with some workday scaling events on a schedule would have more affordable and predictable if the bulk of the workload is 9-6 weekdays. Serverless Aurora is (finally) great, but expensive and really requires some extra work to optimize usages to minimize cost.

        • kyriakos 4 years ago
          AWS is really expensive as you scale unfortunately.
        • x86_64Ubuntu 4 years ago
          I don't think AWS RDS scales like that with "a lot of instances". The only time you would have so many instances is from how many read replicas you setup, and if you have a standby instance. RDS isn't like an EC2 ASG. I might be wrong though ='(

          Source: An AWS Certs Scrub

          • feydaykyn 4 years ago
            At your current scale, just adding a slave for redundancy and hot take over should be enough?

            There's also the aurora serverless way which may be interesting since your workload is only a few hours a day. Scale up automatically during the peak and wind down the rest of the time.

            • pbalau 4 years ago
              > Any idea if that will end up costing me a fortune to go Aurora?

              Define a fortune.

              • chmod775 4 years ago
                Considering you can run a site like his off of a $10 VPS with room to spare for x10 more users, any dollar beyond that better be worth it.

                Sure, going to $50 won't matter to most wallets, but at around $100 you're just getting ripped off and someone is having a laugh at your expense.

                So I'd put 'paying a fortune' at around $100/month for his case.

                • smt88 4 years ago
                  > Sure, going to $50 won't matter to most wallets, but at around $100 you're just getting ripped off and someone is having a laugh at your expense.

                  This comes up on every AWS-related comment section.

                  $100/month for something I could do with VPS is an amazing bargain if it saves me even 2 hours of dev time every month.

                  As someone who used to maintain servers and databases first on dedicated hardware, then on colo servers, and later on vanilla EC2, I am so thankful for RDS. It's absolutely amazing not to have to worry about:

                  - failover

                  - scaling

                  - logs

                  - read(/write) replicas

                  - (restoring) backups

                  - monitoring

                  - maintenance windows

                  - minor version updates

                  - OS updates

                  ...and that's probably not even a complete list.

                  Every VPS-like database management experience I've ever had has caused me a lot of lost sleep. It's just not worth it. I can't imagine why anyone would DIY this stuff if they're working with any kind of budget at all.

                  At the moment, I have an insurance company with hundreds of thousands of customers running on ~$1,000/mo. of AWS services. The modern cloud is amazing and a constant source of joy for someone like me, who has been doing web software for more than 20 years.

              • alphabettsy 4 years ago
                What’s the reason for using Aurora?
              • chrishynes 4 years ago
                Where's MySQL 8 for Aurora? :-/