3 ms·

When I worked for a loan processor, they were quite happy running over $100k/hr revenue through a single instance of PostgreSQL. There were slaves to offload an

When I worked for a loan processor, they were quite happy running over $100k/hr revenue through a single instance of PostgreSQL. There were slaves to offload analytic and report loads but all transactions went through a "SPOF" and we just manned up to keep that database running. Don't tell me "real apps" are all that redundant and bullet-proof. Designing and operating redundant infrastructure is much harder and costlier than most make it out to be.

brianwawok 11y ago
I am not even talking about sharding. I am talking about automatic failover. Which you can do, but it takes pgpool + VIP trickery, and is a lot of setup for a small project. Hosted from AWS or similar is a lot better as they do the crazy setup, but not for local setup. Nice Digital Ocean finally got floating IPs this week which should help there (have not looked into if it will work for PG failover).
- taf2 11y ago
  I'm not sure the floating ip solution from digitalocean is going to be the solution - as it looks like it's only for public ip addresses instead of internal ips... Assuming you only want you db listening on internal ip right?
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    yah so not perfect for sure. With how PG permissions work I am not sure you lose a lot listening on public interface vs digital ocean private but really semi-private interface.
- spacemanmatt 11y ago
  The thing is, if your database goes down, it likely needs to stay down until you understand why it went down and whether it's business-safe to turn it back. PostgreSQL almost does not crash. And when it does, you should care about your system's stability, and a crash is a giant message about stability. Plan for uptime and you'll be more likely to get it, than planning around a buggy server process. (Also, in this case, it would have violated SOX and PCI rules, as well as general sanity, to host a 512GB 64-core server in the cloud)
zenocon 11y ago
Most people don't get this and they over-engineer the f#$%k out of everything.

brianwawok 11y ago

I am not even talking about sharding. I am talking about automatic failover. Which you can do, but it takes pgpool + VIP trickery, and is a lot of setup for a small project. Hosted from AWS or similar is a lot better as they do the crazy setup, but not for local setup. Nice Digital Ocean finally got floating IPs this week which should help there (have not looked into if it will work for PG failover).

taf2 11y ago
I'm not sure the floating ip solution from digitalocean is going to be the solution - as it looks like it's only for public ip addresses instead of internal ips... Assuming you only want you db listening on internal ip right?
- brianwawok 11y ago
  yah so not perfect for sure. With how PG permissions work I am not sure you lose a lot listening on public interface vs digital ocean private but really semi-private interface.
spacemanmatt 11y ago
The thing is, if your database goes down, it likely needs to stay down until you understand why it went down and whether it's business-safe to turn it back. PostgreSQL almost does not crash. And when it does, you should care about your system's stability, and a crash is a giant message about stability. Plan for uptime and you'll be more likely to get it, than planning around a buggy server process. (Also, in this case, it would have violated SOX and PCI rules, as well as general sanity, to host a 512GB 64-core server in the cloud)

zenocon 11y ago

Most people don't get this and they over-engineer the f#$%k out of everything.