6 ms·

The article mentions this, but that’s strongly enough in my opinion. With fly you have no managed PostgreSQL. In my opinion, it’s not really comparable on cost

The article mentions this, but that’s strongly enough in my opinion. With fly you have no managed PostgreSQL. In my opinion, it’s not really comparable on cost to aws when Postgres is in the stack. You do read about interesting hacks where someone will set up rds in a region that may be single digit milliseconds away from a fly region. then, presumably, you could put PG bouncer on a sort of bastion host that connects to the fly wire guard VPN. But obviously, there’s no guarantee that the latency will always be that good.

TheDong 4y ago
> But obviously, there’s no guarantee that the latency will always be that good That guarantee already doesn't exist with RDS. The RDS master is in one AZ, your server may be in another (and if it isn't, well, RDS will fail over to another AZ eventually). The network latency between AWS AZs is usually good, but it can be arbitrarily high, up to full outages between AZs. This is just a measure of degrees. Your application and/or business already has to handle some degree of network issues (aws network outages), so it's a tradeoff of whether the extra hops increase the chance enough to matter.
mike_d 4y ago
https://fly.io/docs/postgres/ https://fly.io/docs/postgres/ It isn't "Managed Postgres," but the differences are minimal. RDS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say "you don't know how to run a database."
- Octabrain 4y ago
  > RDS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say "you don't know how to run a database." I think this is a terrible oversimplification and something tells me that you haven't had to deal with a complex database setup from an operations perspective. RDS reduces a huge overhead in terms of operations (ha, backups, upgrades and clustering being the first ones that come to my mind). Between RDS and running a database on a virtual machine(s) and manage it with, let's say, Ansible for providing the four aforementioned features I would chose RDS any day of the week.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    I look in the mirror and confidently say I don't know how to run a database. Was the grandparent comment meant to be an insult?
    - Octabrain 4y ago
      I didn't interpreted as such but as an oversimplification and a sign of lack of operations experience as I stated at the beginning of my comment.
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      It was clearly intended to dismiss managed databases altogether, so yes.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      I don't think it's an insult. I don't know how to run a database; I want a managed service.
  - ckozlowski 4y ago
    Spot on. RDS is a solution for people who look in the mirror and say "I'd rather be working on other things than running a database." (Disclaimer: I'm a TAM for AWS.)
    - tptacek 4y ago
      In case it needs saying: Fly.io agrees with this! We didn't build our Postgres feature as a statement about the utility of managed Postgres; it's a statement about our size relative to AWS. :P
  - sodapopcan 4y ago
    ...or their primary job has being dealing with a complex database setup and hasn't had to juggle that along with intensive application design. Count me as someone who confidently doesn't know how to run a database and doesn't really care to. At least not at a level where someone would hire me to do it in production.
- klysm 4y ago
  What if I know how, and simultaneously don’t want to?
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > RDS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say "you don't know how to run a database." In the same way that a RDBMS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say “you don’t know how to directly write to disc while guaranteeing the validity of relational data in spite of concurrent writes, power failures, etc.”
  - mike_d 4y ago
    Absolutely spot on comparison. For some people, RDS is the corner stone of their business. For others even a failed database can be rebuilt from logs within hours and it isn't business impacting. Use the tools that make sense, but don't be afraid to pick the right tool.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  > RDS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say "you don't know how to run a database." Which is hopefully virtually everyone whose full-time job isn't DBA.
  - onphonenow 4y ago
    I used to be very dba focused ages ago. Aws RDS for postgres I just love. Their RDS products must print money. Yes I could deploy myself. Yes I could use docker in various ways - I use docker for most app deploys. But but but - if you’ve been down the rabbit hole of scaling a database - or backing up, updating, securing etc its a no brainer - and aws let’s you start small
funstuff007 4y ago
Isn't it usually a bad idea to have the database and application server in different data centers? It is / was my understanding that both the database and application server should ideally be on the same rack.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- RussianCow 4y ago
  It's really just a matter of latency and bandwidth costs. If you can tolerate both, then keeping them in different data centers is fine. In fact, depending on your architecture, you may have to do this at some point anyway, even within the same cloud provider.
mrkurt 4y ago
RDS works really well with Fly apps. We often see lower latency between Fly.io and us-east-1 in Ashburn than an app does spanning two availability zones in us-east-1. But, realistically, we'd like a managed Postgres provider on Fly.io hardware. It's a much better developer experience, we need DBs in every region, and our private networking is pretty dang powerful. I think we're close, but we may need to get a little bigger before we seem relevant to them. We're weirdly closer to managed MySQL than Postgres.
- tokamak-teapot 4y ago
  Thanks for this, this is the info I was looking for. I'm thinking of using fly.io for some bigger projects and was considering the possibility of having data on AWS, so this is great to hear.
nine_k 4y ago
Does Fly allow to run unmanaged Postres easily enough? Or even semi-managed, as easy-to-provision nodes without redundancy where you yourself set up pgbouncer, replication, etc? For simpler cases it could very well suffice.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Fly Postgres is just a Fly.io app. You can see the source code for it right here: https://github.com/fly-apps/postgres-ha https://github.com/fly-apps/postgres-ha It has some direct `flyctl` integration (which is also open source), but it's not doing anything you can't do yourself if you want.

TheDong 4y ago

> But obviously, there’s no guarantee that the latency will always be that good That guarantee already doesn't exist with RDS. The RDS master is in one AZ, your server may be in another (and if it isn't, well, RDS will fail over to another AZ eventually). The network latency between AWS AZs is usually good, but it can be arbitrarily high, up to full outages between AZs. This is just a measure of degrees. Your application and/or business already has to handle some degree of network issues (aws network outages), so it's a tradeoff of whether the extra hops increase the chance enough to matter.

mike_d 4y ago

https://fly.io/docs/postgres/ https://fly.io/docs/postgres/ It isn't "Managed Postgres," but the differences are minimal. RDS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say "you don't know how to run a database."

Octabrain 4y ago
> RDS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say "you don't know how to run a database." I think this is a terrible oversimplification and something tells me that you haven't had to deal with a complex database setup from an operations perspective. RDS reduces a huge overhead in terms of operations (ha, backups, upgrades and clustering being the first ones that come to my mind). Between RDS and running a database on a virtual machine(s) and manage it with, let's say, Ansible for providing the four aforementioned features I would chose RDS any day of the week.
- jrockway 4y ago
  I look in the mirror and confidently say I don't know how to run a database. Was the grandparent comment meant to be an insult?
  - Octabrain 4y ago
    I didn't interpreted as such but as an oversimplification and a sign of lack of operations experience as I stated at the beginning of my comment.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    It was clearly intended to dismiss managed databases altogether, so yes.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I don't think it's an insult. I don't know how to run a database; I want a managed service.
- ckozlowski 4y ago
  Spot on. RDS is a solution for people who look in the mirror and say "I'd rather be working on other things than running a database." (Disclaimer: I'm a TAM for AWS.)
  - tptacek 4y ago
    In case it needs saying: Fly.io agrees with this! We didn't build our Postgres feature as a statement about the utility of managed Postgres; it's a statement about our size relative to AWS. :P
- sodapopcan 4y ago
  ...or their primary job has being dealing with a complex database setup and hasn't had to juggle that along with intensive application design. Count me as someone who confidently doesn't know how to run a database and doesn't really care to. At least not at a level where someone would hire me to do it in production.
klysm 4y ago
What if I know how, and simultaneously don’t want to?
tshaddox 4y ago
> RDS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say "you don't know how to run a database." In the same way that a RDBMS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say “you don’t know how to directly write to disc while guaranteeing the validity of relational data in spite of concurrent writes, power failures, etc.”
- mike_d 4y ago
  Absolutely spot on comparison. For some people, RDS is the corner stone of their business. For others even a failed database can be rebuilt from logs within hours and it isn't business impacting. Use the tools that make sense, but don't be afraid to pick the right tool.
petesergeant 4y ago
> RDS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say "you don't know how to run a database." Which is hopefully virtually everyone whose full-time job isn't DBA.
- onphonenow 4y ago
  I used to be very dba focused ages ago. Aws RDS for postgres I just love. Their RDS products must print money. Yes I could deploy myself. Yes I could use docker in various ways - I use docker for most app deploys. But but but - if you’ve been down the rabbit hole of scaling a database - or backing up, updating, securing etc its a no brainer - and aws let’s you start small

funstuff007 4y ago

Isn't it usually a bad idea to have the database and application server in different data centers? It is / was my understanding that both the database and application server should ideally be on the same rack.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
RussianCow 4y ago
It's really just a matter of latency and bandwidth costs. If you can tolerate both, then keeping them in different data centers is fine. In fact, depending on your architecture, you may have to do this at some point anyway, even within the same cloud provider.

mrkurt 4y ago

RDS works really well with Fly apps. We often see lower latency between Fly.io and us-east-1 in Ashburn than an app does spanning two availability zones in us-east-1. But, realistically, we'd like a managed Postgres provider on Fly.io hardware. It's a much better developer experience, we need DBs in every region, and our private networking is pretty dang powerful. I think we're close, but we may need to get a little bigger before we seem relevant to them. We're weirdly closer to managed MySQL than Postgres.

tokamak-teapot 4y ago
Thanks for this, this is the info I was looking for. I'm thinking of using fly.io for some bigger projects and was considering the possibility of having data on AWS, so this is great to hear.

nine_k 4y ago

Does Fly allow to run unmanaged Postres easily enough? Or even semi-managed, as easy-to-provision nodes without redundancy where you yourself set up pgbouncer, replication, etc? For simpler cases it could very well suffice.

tptacek 4y ago
Fly Postgres is just a Fly.io app. You can see the source code for it right here: https://github.com/fly-apps/postgres-ha https://github.com/fly-apps/postgres-ha It has some direct `flyctl` integration (which is also open source), but it's not doing anything you can't do yourself if you want.