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I recently used Digital Ocean managed PostgreSQL 11 and was pleasantly surprised. Having used Amazon RDS in the past, I found DO's offering to be simpler and fa

by davb 8y ago

I recently used Digital Ocean managed PostgreSQL 11 and was pleasantly surprised. Having used Amazon RDS in the past, I found DO's offering to be simpler and faster to provision. I did have an issue whereby the password they showed for a newly created user (on the Web UI) didn't work and I had to reset the password to generate a new one, but otherwise it was pretty reliable. The documentation could do with some expansion (the cluster has some default roles that DO create but these don't seem to be documented anywhere) and it would be great to see wider extension support (I considered trialling pgaudit but it wasn't supported). Overall we were really pleased. We're a small team without a dedicated DBA at this point, so outsourcing management of our database infrastructure was a no brainer. I was more keen on managed vanilla PostgreSQL than something like Aurora (where the implementation could stray enough from the origin that it would more difficult to migrate away should we have the need).

scarface74 8y ago
Really? The lock in boogeyman... If you’re using standard Postgres and reading the standard Postgres documentation, how would you even know about any Amazon extensions? Does DO give you data storage across three availability zones? Point in time backups? Autoscaling synchronous read replicas?
- davb 8y ago
  I'm not sure if DO's offering has the feature parity you need, but it works really well for us, at our scale. Having done many migrations between technologies over the years, I think it's prudent to have some level of skepticism when it comes to "forked but compatible" systems. I don't consider proprietary lock in to be a boogeyman. That's not to say all proprietary technologies are bad (they're not! We use them mix of proprietary and open tech) but having an escape hatch is one of our criteria for adopting closed tech. Especially cloud services where prices aren't fixed and are subject to future increase.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    If you are interacting with the database using the standard Postgres drivers using the standard Postgres syntax why does it matter what’s going on under the hood?
    - merlinsbrain 8y ago
      I don’t know of a single non-trivial situation where you can ASSUME that 2 implementations of the same spec will behave exactly the same in all possible scenarios. It’s possible your error budget accounts for this potential difference, the parents error budget seems to have no room for the possibility of edge case bugs/divergence in the implementation of their database of choice.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        They start with the same open source code. The main difference between Postgres and Aurora/Postgres is the storage engine and optional integration with AWS IAM, S3 extensions. If AWS didn’t store the data in a way that was cross compatible with Postgres. There would be a major outcry. But he is using DO. I doubt that his requirements are that of a large enterprise. I don’t know of one large enterprise that you could go to and say we want to use Digital Ocean.

by davb 8y ago

scarface74 8y ago

Really? The lock in boogeyman... If you’re using standard Postgres and reading the standard Postgres documentation, how would you even know about any Amazon extensions? Does DO give you data storage across three availability zones? Point in time backups? Autoscaling synchronous read replicas?

davb 8y ago
I'm not sure if DO's offering has the feature parity you need, but it works really well for us, at our scale. Having done many migrations between technologies over the years, I think it's prudent to have some level of skepticism when it comes to "forked but compatible" systems. I don't consider proprietary lock in to be a boogeyman. That's not to say all proprietary technologies are bad (they're not! We use them mix of proprietary and open tech) but having an escape hatch is one of our criteria for adopting closed tech. Especially cloud services where prices aren't fixed and are subject to future increase.
- scarface74 8y ago
  If you are interacting with the database using the standard Postgres drivers using the standard Postgres syntax why does it matter what’s going on under the hood?
  - merlinsbrain 8y ago
    I don’t know of a single non-trivial situation where you can ASSUME that 2 implementations of the same spec will behave exactly the same in all possible scenarios. It’s possible your error budget accounts for this potential difference, the parents error budget seems to have no room for the possibility of edge case bugs/divergence in the implementation of their database of choice.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      They start with the same open source code. The main difference between Postgres and Aurora/Postgres is the storage engine and optional integration with AWS IAM, S3 extensions. If AWS didn’t store the data in a way that was cross compatible with Postgres. There would be a major outcry. But he is using DO. I doubt that his requirements are that of a large enterprise. I don’t know of one large enterprise that you could go to and say we want to use Digital Ocean.