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Having previously been on several managed PostgreSQL providers and now on AWS Aurora -- Aurora has been pretty great in terms of reliability and performance wit
by iancarroll 2y ago
Having previously been on several managed PostgreSQL providers and now on AWS Aurora -- Aurora has been pretty great in terms of reliability and performance with large row counts and upsert performance.
However, Aurora isn't cheap and is at least ~80% of our monthly AWS bill. I wonder how it is cheaper than Heroku's previous offerings? Is it Aurora Serverless v2 or something like that to reduce cost? Aurora billing is largely around IOPS, and Heroku's pricing doesn't seem to reflect that.
- encoderer 2y agoAurora has a new configuration option that changes billing from iops to higher storage costs. Might be what this is using.
- iancarroll 2y agoYeah, that’s what we use as well but I don’t think that addresses the underlying instance cost? I’m not familiar with Serverless v2 though, if that’s what this is using.
- paulddraper 2y agoThe instance cost is not much different then normal heroku compute
- drusepth 2y agoHeroku Postgres has always been priced on platform convenience with very high margins. It's been many years now so I don't remember the exact numbers, but I moved a few databases from Heroku to AWS and reduced my DB costs ~90% (magnitude ~900/mo --> ~100/mo) for roughly the same specs. They probably have a lot of margins to eat into before they need to adjust prices.
- iancarroll 2y agoI am not seeing the margins in this $5/mo instance but I could be wrong!
- eljimmy 2y agoWe're using the highest tier Postgres instance at my work for one of our legacy Heroku apps and it costs thousands over what we'd pay for the equivalent on AWS directly.
- iancarroll 2y agoSure, but those are not related to Aurora or this post.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eljimmy 2y agoUm, what? It's literally what we're talking about haha
- iancarroll 2y agoThis post is talking about plans that are at most $20/month. I don't believe the other Heroku plans are on Aurora.
- jmspring 2y agoI know Salesforce has a huge AWS presence. That said, is it possible they are doing multitenancy? I don't know myself.
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- csande17 2y agoAccording to https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql the instances they're using for this tier have zero bytes of RAM, so presumably that's where they're getting most of their cost savings from.
- chuckadams 2y agoJust curious, does Aurora scale down at all in price, i.e. if I have a test instance that's hardly ever used, does it ever end up being cheaper than a classic RDS instance?
- nilamo 2y agoIt scales to zero, so costs nothing when it's not in use...
- hfern 2y agoCan you share which configuration scales to $0? I am not aware of that being possible. Even the serverless option has a base ACU rate.
- bdcravens 2y agov1 of Serverless did scale to 0, but that's no longer an option
- debuggerpk 2y agothat has not been my experience.
- bdcravens 2y agoYou're thinking of Aurora Serverless, but the typical Aurora customer isn't using the Serverless offering. Additionally, the original version of Aurora Serverless scaled to 0, but v2 doesn't. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/aurora-serverless-v2.setting-capacity.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...
- osigurdson 2y ago>> but the typical Aurora customer isn't using the Serverless offering Just wondering, why is that?
- andrewstuart 2y ago>> Aurora isn't cheap and is at least ~80% of our monthly AWS bill. Why don't you run your own Postgres? It's not hard - why pay such a premium for the Amazon version?
- szundi 2y agoIs it less true for other cloud stuff?
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoIf you’re using Aurora and not RDS you’re probably outside of the zone where rolling your own Postgres is easy.
- sgarland 2y agoSo figure it out. I don’t understand why “ugh this is hard, I’ll pay someone else” has become the norm. You’re working in one of the most technically advanced fields in the world; act like it.
- vasco 2y agoMost people aren't doing anything advanced. Also this has nothing to do with not wanting to do "hard things", that's ridiculous, it's a postgres cluster, you're not doing a PhD in math. People do it because there's limited time and no business advantage to operate postgres clusters. Use the time on what your business actually does.
- sgarland 2y ago> that's ridiculous, it's a postgres cluster, you're not doing a PhD in math. It's not as difficult as a PhD (I assume; I only got as far as an MS), but based on what I've witnessed, it's up there in complexity. There are dozens of knobs to turn – not as many as MySQL/InnoDB to be fair, but still a lot – things you have to know before they matter, etc. > People do it because there's limited time and no business advantage to operate postgres clusters. Use the time on what your business actually does. I've seen this argument countless times for SaaS anything. I don't think it's accurate for a database. Hear me out. For most companies, the DB is the heart. Everything is recorded there, nearly every service's app needs it (whether it's a monolith or micro service-oriented DBs), and it's critically important to the company's survival. Worse, the same skills necessary for operating your own DB generally overlap heavily with optimally running a DB, by which I mean if you're good at things like DB backup automation, chances are you're also good at query optimization, schema design, etc. It's that latter part that seems to be missing from many engineering orgs. "Just use Postgres," people say; "just add a JSONB column and figure out the schema later," but later never comes. If your business uses a DB, then you do not have the luxury of running one poorly. Spend a few days learning SQL, it's an easy language to pick up. Then spend a few days going through the docs for your DB, and try the concepts out in a test instance. Your investment will be rewarded.
- jrockway 2y agoAurora has treated us well. We make a self-hosted product that requires Postgres; our sales/customer engineering folks just started telling people to use Aurora, and it hasn't caused any problems despite the fact that all of our tests run against stock Postgres. Can't complain. Though a VM with Postgres would be plenty for our needs, and cost thousands of dollars less a month. But, HA is nice if you want to pay for it.
- alexey-salmin 2y agoTry the Aurora IO-optimized, it's a (relatively new) game changer price-wise. I'm migrating a 1tb database to it right now because I'm paying too much for iops even on the regular rds postgres. I'm also quite sure this is what heroku must be using or they would be out of business because of the pricing mismatch.
- dangoodmanUT 2y agoThis, Aurora normal is useless now
- p0seidon 2y agoHow much do you expect the price to drop?
- Scubabear68 2y agoCame here to say this. Aurora is good but also very expensive. If your queries are not very well tuned you will pay through the nose for I/O that would be unnoticeable in other Postgres implementations. For a very modest installation I saw DB bills go down from $3,000 a month on Aurora to about $100 for self managed Postgres.
- rnts08 2y agoEverything on Heroku is billed with a huge margin, plus as they're probably a partnered customer by now their pricing is a fraction of the average AWS customers pricing. I've been at companies on both sides of the partner pricing list and the difference is huge.
- dangoodmanUT 2y agoUse io optimized