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I switched to DigitalOcean and it's been a delight. $15/month for a managed Postgres is a good deal, and I am really tired of the hellscape that has become AWS

I switched to DigitalOcean and it's been a delight. $15/month for a managed Postgres is a good deal, and I am really tired of the hellscape that has become AWS configuration even for the most simplest things. Isn't the whole point of the cloud is simplicity?

delfinom 3y ago
Hahaha. The point of cloud was selling businesses on IT as a subscription. And it did start simple as "look ma, no hands managing a database". But then biggesr cloud providers went and threw themselves heavily at sales to enterprises. And well, they start adding more features for enterprises. And as they add more features, they all more technical and security complex. Next thing you know, you fired your on premise IT staff and hired just as many if not more staff just to babysit your aws usage. Lol Or you subscribe to another saas service to try and automate away automating in AWS. Lol
- intelVISA 3y ago
  Sell the shovels, as they say. :)
paulddraper 3y ago
What has gotten more complicated that used to be simpler in AWS?
- tempnow987 3y ago
  I started with AWS pretty early. Networking was drop dead simple. Basically I think all my instances got an 10.x.x.x IP address. You had a basic firewall (security groups nowadays) but that was it. Let's say you had another account for a separate project or a client with another account. You could literally connect to their instance via private IP. All your own resources and all theirs were in this same 10.x.x.x address space which seemed to be globally reachable inside AWS. The layers of config to go across account now between different orgs is wild by comparison.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Like EC2 Classic? 2000s-era?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  The number of instance types alone for RDS is ... around 200? Then there's storage types, IOPS, multi-zone, etc. All of that without any price estimate. Which is by design, of course. Digital Ocean will give you the cost as you configure the options. Complete transparency. This is how it SHOULD be. Cost obfuscation is an AWS feature. I was afraid to spin up the smallest instance because I didn't want to find out it was going to cost me over $100 at the end of the billing cycle.
npteljes 3y ago
>Isn't the whole point of the cloud is simplicity? Maybe for a few cloud offerings, but not for cloud in general. I think the point of the cloud is that businesses can exchange employees for services, and shift some of the maintenance responsibility. No service is for the people who actually interact with it. It's for the ones that pay for it.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  No, for example, I couldn’t manage a database as well as RDS and I wouldn’t want to, I don’t believe I could hire the several people required to replicate what RDS can do as well as RDS can do it. The primary benefit of cloud though is that you don’t have to fight for or wait for capital expenditure budgets to grow, you don’t have to wait for hardware to arrive, you don’t have to negotiate with vendors, you don’t have to fight about how long you should keep old hardware or replace it, you don’t have to deal at all with the political or business aspects of managing millions of dollars of hardware. I can just go on a website and click a few buttons and have something new, and the biggest argument about it is a yearly cloud budget discussion.
  - npteljes 3y ago
    I completely agree. I see this point in cloud too, and this is really missing from my original comment. Cloud is a huge enabler, and basically 0 upfront cost.
  - killerstorm 3y ago
    It seems a bit odd to me that it's hard to manage a database. It's just a collection of binaries configured with a few pages of text. The configuration should be fairly similar for a typical setup. So why is it complex? I mean, is it a fundamental complexity, or is it more like "nobody bothered to write an easy configuration script", or is it learned helplessness?
    - renegade-otter 3y ago
      If the primary fails, will the replica fail over? How do you know? Are the backups working? Who's checking? Can anyone delete a directory when tired at 6PM on a Friday? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLdRBsuvVKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLdRBsuvVKc
neilv 3y ago
For kitchen table startups that nevertheless deal in important data, having reliable managed PostgreSQL for much lower cost than AWS RDS would be awesome. The main thing I'm looking for in managed PostgreSQL isn't "installation" -- that's easy -- what I need is not to have to spend weeks of configuring and testing and drilling, to be reasonably confident that I won't lose customer data. I see DigitalOcean does PG standby servers, and daily backups, but I'm unclear on whether they're doing separate, say, WAL-based backups. The couple mentions I saw of "PITR" seemed to conflate that with the daily backups. There's a partial description of the UI, but it's still unclear: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/databases/postgresql/how-to/restore-from-backups/ https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/databases/postgresql/... > In the Create a new cluster from a backup window that opens, choose whether you want to restore to the latest transaction available or choose a point in time, What's the "latest transaction available"? (Is it to moments before someone ripped the cables out of the storage server? Or is it the most recent daily backup, which might've been 23 hours ago?) > By default, the name is the original databases’ name appended with the date of the backup and the word “backup”, like originalname-aug-13-backup. I don't want to be trying urgently to recover the businesses of myself and my customers, and find myself asking design questions akin to "Why isn't this a UTC ISO date/timestamp?" but more like "Why are the backups done in such a way that they can't be restored for this ordinary failure scenario that just happened?" I don't see any technical reason that a cloud provider can't give enterprise DBA confidence at kitchen table startup rates, but I'd feel silly for assuming that they do.
- AMartin223 3y ago
  FYI to answer your questions both Aiven (the one mentioned by ElephantSQL as the partnered migration path) and Digitalocean do regular WAL-based backups in addition to the daily, so latest transaction available is 'moments before someone ripped the cables'. It does kind of suck the docs are not super clear about that though.
  - neilv 3y ago
    Thank you. That helps. Though, not finding documentation that they even do it doesn't give me the confidence that they've been really rigorous about implementing it. I think, the next time I need this for a kitchen table startup, I'll have see whether the documentation is much more reassuring then, or contact them. If I need more reassurance than I'm getting, I might have to get AWS startup credits, and hope AWS costs don't outpace my ability to pay.

delfinom 3y ago

Hahaha. The point of cloud was selling businesses on IT as a subscription. And it did start simple as "look ma, no hands managing a database". But then biggesr cloud providers went and threw themselves heavily at sales to enterprises. And well, they start adding more features for enterprises. And as they add more features, they all more technical and security complex. Next thing you know, you fired your on premise IT staff and hired just as many if not more staff just to babysit your aws usage. Lol Or you subscribe to another saas service to try and automate away automating in AWS. Lol

intelVISA 3y ago
Sell the shovels, as they say. :)

paulddraper 3y ago

What has gotten more complicated that used to be simpler in AWS?

tempnow987 3y ago
I started with AWS pretty early. Networking was drop dead simple. Basically I think all my instances got an 10.x.x.x IP address. You had a basic firewall (security groups nowadays) but that was it. Let's say you had another account for a separate project or a client with another account. You could literally connect to their instance via private IP. All your own resources and all theirs were in this same 10.x.x.x address space which seemed to be globally reachable inside AWS. The layers of config to go across account now between different orgs is wild by comparison.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Like EC2 Classic? 2000s-era?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
renegade-otter 3y ago
The number of instance types alone for RDS is ... around 200? Then there's storage types, IOPS, multi-zone, etc. All of that without any price estimate. Which is by design, of course. Digital Ocean will give you the cost as you configure the options. Complete transparency. This is how it SHOULD be. Cost obfuscation is an AWS feature. I was afraid to spin up the smallest instance because I didn't want to find out it was going to cost me over $100 at the end of the billing cycle.

npteljes 3y ago

>Isn't the whole point of the cloud is simplicity? Maybe for a few cloud offerings, but not for cloud in general. I think the point of the cloud is that businesses can exchange employees for services, and shift some of the maintenance responsibility. No service is for the people who actually interact with it. It's for the ones that pay for it.

colechristensen 3y ago
No, for example, I couldn’t manage a database as well as RDS and I wouldn’t want to, I don’t believe I could hire the several people required to replicate what RDS can do as well as RDS can do it. The primary benefit of cloud though is that you don’t have to fight for or wait for capital expenditure budgets to grow, you don’t have to wait for hardware to arrive, you don’t have to negotiate with vendors, you don’t have to fight about how long you should keep old hardware or replace it, you don’t have to deal at all with the political or business aspects of managing millions of dollars of hardware. I can just go on a website and click a few buttons and have something new, and the biggest argument about it is a yearly cloud budget discussion.
- npteljes 3y ago
  I completely agree. I see this point in cloud too, and this is really missing from my original comment. Cloud is a huge enabler, and basically 0 upfront cost.
- killerstorm 3y ago
  It seems a bit odd to me that it's hard to manage a database. It's just a collection of binaries configured with a few pages of text. The configuration should be fairly similar for a typical setup. So why is it complex? I mean, is it a fundamental complexity, or is it more like "nobody bothered to write an easy configuration script", or is it learned helplessness?
  - renegade-otter 3y ago
    If the primary fails, will the replica fail over? How do you know? Are the backups working? Who's checking? Can anyone delete a directory when tired at 6PM on a Friday? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLdRBsuvVKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLdRBsuvVKc

neilv 3y ago

For kitchen table startups that nevertheless deal in important data, having reliable managed PostgreSQL for much lower cost than AWS RDS would be awesome. The main thing I'm looking for in managed PostgreSQL isn't "installation" -- that's easy -- what I need is not to have to spend weeks of configuring and testing and drilling, to be reasonably confident that I won't lose customer data. I see DigitalOcean does PG standby servers, and daily backups, but I'm unclear on whether they're doing separate, say, WAL-based backups. The couple mentions I saw of "PITR" seemed to conflate that with the daily backups. There's a partial description of the UI, but it's still unclear: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/databases/postgresql/how-to/restore-from-backups/ https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/databases/postgresql/... > In the Create a new cluster from a backup window that opens, choose whether you want to restore to the latest transaction available or choose a point in time, What's the "latest transaction available"? (Is it to moments before someone ripped the cables out of the storage server? Or is it the most recent daily backup, which might've been 23 hours ago?) > By default, the name is the original databases’ name appended with the date of the backup and the word “backup”, like originalname-aug-13-backup. I don't want to be trying urgently to recover the businesses of myself and my customers, and find myself asking design questions akin to "Why isn't this a UTC ISO date/timestamp?" but more like "Why are the backups done in such a way that they can't be restored for this ordinary failure scenario that just happened?" I don't see any technical reason that a cloud provider can't give enterprise DBA confidence at kitchen table startup rates, but I'd feel silly for assuming that they do.

AMartin223 3y ago
FYI to answer your questions both Aiven (the one mentioned by ElephantSQL as the partnered migration path) and Digitalocean do regular WAL-based backups in addition to the daily, so latest transaction available is 'moments before someone ripped the cables'. It does kind of suck the docs are not super clear about that though.
- neilv 3y ago
  Thank you. That helps. Though, not finding documentation that they even do it doesn't give me the confidence that they've been really rigorous about implementing it. I think, the next time I need this for a kitchen table startup, I'll have see whether the documentation is much more reassuring then, or contact them. If I need more reassurance than I'm getting, I might have to get AWS startup credits, and hope AWS costs don't outpace my ability to pay.