Aurora is a closed-source fork of PostgreSQL. So it is indeed not possible to self-host it.
However a self-hosted PostgreSQL on a bare metal server with NVMe SSDs will much faster than what RDS is capable of. Especially at the same price points.
Aurora is a closed-source fork of PostgreSQL. So it is indeed not possible to self-host it.
However a self-hosted PostgreSQL on a bare metal server with NVMe SSDs will much faster than what RDS is capable of. Especially at the same price points.
Yep! I was mostly replying to TFA’s claim that AWS RDS is
> Standard Postgres compiled with some AWS-specific monitoring hooks
… and other operational tools deployed alongside it. That’s not always true: RDS classic may be those things, but RDS Aurora/Serverless is anything but.
As to whether
> self-hosted PostgreSQL on a bare metal server with NVMe SSDs will much faster than what RDS is capable of
That’s often but not always true. Plenty of workloads will perform better on RDS (read auto scaling is huge in Serverless: you can have new read replica nodes auto-launch in response to e.g. a wave of concurrent, massive reporting queries; many queries can benefit from RDS’s additions to/modifications of the pg buffer cache system that work with the underlying storage)—and that’s even with the VM tax and the networked-storage tax! Of course, it’ll cost more in real money whether or not it performs better, further complicating the cost/benefit analysis here.
Also, pedantically, you can run RDS on bare metal with local NVMEs.
> Also, pedantically, you can run RDS on bare metal with local NVMEs.
Only if you like your data to evaporate when the server stops.
I'm relatively sure that the processing power and memory you can buy on OVH / Hetzner / co. is larger and cheaper even if you take into account peaks in your usage patterns.
> Only if you like your data to evaporate when the server stops.
(Edited to remove glib and vague rejoinder, sorry) Then hibernate/reboot it instead of stopping it? Alternatively, that’s what backup-to S3, periodic snapshot-to-EBS, clustering, or running an EBS-persisted zero-query-volume tiny replica are for.
> the processing power and memory you can buy on OVH / Hetzner / co. is larger and cheaper
Cheaper? Yeah, generally. But larger/more performant? Not always—it’s not about peaks/autoscaling, it’s about the (large) minority of workloads that will work better on RDS/Aurora/Serverless: auto-scale-out makes the reports run on time regardless of cost; bulk data loads are available on replicas a lot sooner on Aurora because the storage is the replication system, not the WAL; and so on—if you add up all the situations where the hosted RDBMS systems trump self hosted, you get an amount that’s not “hosted is always better/worth it”, but it’s not “hosted is just ops time savings and is otherwise just slower/more expensive” either. And that’s before you add reliability into the conversation.