Comment by steveBK123
2 years ago
RDS pricing is deranged at the scales I've seen too. $60k/year for something I could run on just a slice of one of my on-prem $20k servers. This is something we would have run 10s of. $600k/year operational against sub-$100k capital cost pays DBAs, backups, etc with money to spare.
Sure, maybe if you are some sort of SaaS with a need for a small single DB, that also needs to be resilient, backed up, rock solid bulletproof.. it makes sense? But how many cases are there of this? If its so fundamental to your product and needs such uptime & redundancy, what are the odds its also reasonably small?
> Sure, maybe if you are some sort of SaaS with a need for a small single DB, that also needs to be resilient, backed up, rock solid bulletproof.. it makes sense? But how many cases are there of this?
Most software startups these days? The blog post is about work done at a startup after all. By the time your db is big enough to cost an unreasonable amount on RDS, you’re likely a big enough team to have options. If you’re a small startup, saving a couple hundred bucks a month by self managing your database is rarely a good choice. There’re more valuable things to work on.
>By the time your db is big enough to cost an unreasonable amount on RDS, you’re likely a big enough team to have options.
By the time your db is big enough to cost an unreasonable amount on RDS, you've likely got so much momentum that getting off is nearly impossible as you bleed cash.
You can buy a used server and find colocation space and still be pennies on the dollar for even the smallest database. If you're doing more than prototyping, you're probably wasting money.
In the small SaaS startup case, I’d say the production database is typically the most critical single piece of infra, so self hosting is just not a compelling proposition unless you have a strong technical reason where having super powerful database hardware is important, or a team with multiple people who have sysadmin or DBA experience. I think both of those cases are unusual.
I’ve been the guy managing a critical self-hosted database in a small team, and it’s such a distraction from focusing on the actual core product.
To me, the cost of RDS covers tons of risks and time sinks: having to document the db server setup so I’m not the only one on the team who actually knows how to operate it, setting up monitoring, foolproof backups so I don’t need to worry that they’re silently failing because a volume is full and I misconfigured the monitoring, PITR for when someone ships a bad migration, one click HA so the database itself is very unlikely to wake me at 3am, blue/green deploys to make major version upgrades totally painless, never having to think about hardware failures or borked dist-upgrades, and so on.
Each of those is ultimately either undifferentiated work to develop in-house RDS features that could have been better spent on product, or a risk of significant data loss, downtime, or firefighting. RDS looks like a pretty good deal, up to a point.
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> you've likely got so much momentum that getting off is nearly impossible as you bleed cash.
Databases are not particularly difficult to migrate between machines. Of all the cloud services to migrate, they might actually be the easiest, since the databases don't have different API's that need to be rewritten for, and database replication is a well-established thing.
Getting off is quite the opposite of nearly impossible.
That’s just another way of saying the opportunity cost isn’t worth paying to do the migration.
Optionality and flexibility are extremely valuable, and that is why cloud compute continues to be popular, especially for rapidly/burstily growing businesses like startups.
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I have a small MySQL database that’s rather important, and RDS was a complete failure.
It would have cost a negligible amount. But the sheer amount of time I wasted before I gave up was honestly quite surprising. Let’s see:
- I wanted one simple extension. I could have compromised on this, but getting it to work on RDS was a nonstarter.
- I wanted RDS to _import the data_. Nope, RDS isn’t “SUPER,” so it rejects a bunch of stuff that mysqldump emits. Hacking around it with sed was not confidence-inspiring.
- The database uses GTIDs and needed to maintain replication to a non-AWS system. RDS nominally supports GTID, but the documented way to enable it at import time strongly suggests that whoever wrote the docs doesn’t actually understand the purpose of GTID, and it wasn’t clear that RDS could do it right. At least Azure’s docs suggested that I could have written code to target some strange APIs to program the thing correctly.
Time wasted: a surprising number of hours. I’d rather give someone a bit of money to manage the thing, but it’s still on a combination of plain cloud servers and bare metal. Oh well.
replication to non-AWS systems. "simple" extension problems importing data into RDS because of your custom stuff lurking in a mysqldump
Sounds like you are walking massive edge
> Sure, maybe if you are some sort of SaaS with a need for a small single DB, that also needs to be resilient, backed up, rock solid bulletproof.. it makes sense? But how many cases are there of this?
Very small businesses with phone apps or web apps are often using it. There are cheaper options of course, but when there is no "prem" and there are 1-5 employees then it doesn't make much sense to hire for infra. You outsource all digital work to an agency who sets you up a cloud account so you have ownership, but they do all software dev and infra work.
> If its so fundamental to your product and needs such uptime & redundancy, what are the odds its also reasonably small?
Small businesses again, some of my clients could probably run off a Pentium 4 from 2008, but due to nature of the org and agency engagement it often needs to live in the cloud somewhere.
I am constantly beating the drum to reduce costs and use as little infra as needed though, so in a sense I agree, but the engagement is what it is.
Additionally, everyone wants to believe they will need to hyperscale, so even medium scale businesses over-provision and some agencies are happen to do that for them as they profit off the margin.
A lot of my clients are small businesses in that range or bigger.
AWS and the like are rarely a cost effective option, but it is something a lot of agencies like, largely because they are not paying the bills. The clients do not usually care because they are comfortable with a known brand and the costs are a small proportion of the overall costs.
A real small business will be fine just using a VPS provider or a rented server. This solves the problem of not having on premise hardware. They can then run everything on a single server, which is a lot simpler to set up, and a lot simpler to secure. That means the cost of paying someone to run it is a lot lower too as they are needed only occasionally.
They rarely need very resilient systems as they amount of money lost to downtime is relatively small - so even on AWS they are not going to be running in multiple availability zones etc.
Lots of cases. It doesn't even have to be a tiny database. Within <1TB range there's a huge number of online companies that don't need to do more than hundreds of queries per second, but need the reliability and quick failover that RDS gives them. The $600k cost is absurd indeed, but it's not the range of what those companies spend.
Also, Aurora gives you the block level cluster that you can't deploy on your own - it's way easier to work with than the usual replication.
Once you commit to more deeply Amazon flavored parts of AWS like Aurora, aren't you now fairly committed to hoping your scale never exceeds the cost-benefit tradeoff?
If my scale exceeds the cost benefit tradeoff, then I will thank God/Allah/Buddah/Spaghetti Monster.
These questions always sound flawed to me. It's like asking won't I regret moving to California and paying high taxes once I start making millions of dollars? Maybe? But that's an amazing problem to have and one that I may be much better equipped to solve.
If you are small, RDS is much cheaper, and many company killing events, such as not testing your backups are solved. If you are big and you can afford a 60K/yr RDS bill than you can make changes to move on-prem. Or you can open up excel and do the math if your margins are meaningfully affected by moving on-prem.
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Aurora supports standard Postgres clients.
So moving to/from Aurora/RDS/own EC2/on-prem should be a matter of networking and changing connection strings in the clients.
Your operational requirements and processes (backup/restore, failover, DR etc) will change, but that's because you're making a deliberate decision weighing up those costs vs benefits.
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If you’re paying list price at scale you are doing it very wrong.
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Or you're realistic about what you're doing. Will you ever need to scale more than 10x? And on the timescales where you do grow over 10x, would it be better to reconsider/re-architect everything anyway?
I mean, I'm looking after a 4 instance Aurora cluster which is great feature wise, is slightly overprovisioned for special events, and is more likely to shrink than grow 2x in the next decade. If we start experiencing any issues, there's lots of optimisations that can be still gained from better caching and that work will be cheaper than the instance size upgrade.
…no?
There’s still a defined cost to swapping your DB code over to a different backend. At the point where it becomes uneconomical, you’re also at a scale you can afford rewriting a module.
That’s why we have things like “hexagonal architecture”, which focus on isolating the storage protocol from the code. There’s an art to designing such that your prototype can scale with only minor rework — but that’s why we have senior engineers.
RDS is not so bulletproof as advertised, and the support is first arrogant then (maybe) helpful.
People pay for RDS because they want to believe in a fairy tale that it will keep potential problems away and that it worked well for other customers. But those mythical other customers also paid based on such belief. Plus, no one wants to admit that they pay money in such irrational way. It's a bubble
Plus aws outright lie to us about zero downtime upgrades.
Come time for force major upgrade shoved down our throat? Downtime, surprise, surprise
> $600k/year operational against sub-$100k capital cost pays DBAs, backups, etc with money to spare.
One of these is not like the others (DBAs are not capex.)
Have you ever considered that if a company can get the same result for the same price ($100K opex for RDS vs same for human DBA), it actually makes much more sense to go the route that takes the human out of the loop?
The human shows up hungover, goes crazy, gropes Stacy from HR, etc.
RDS just hums along without all the liabilities.
And when you have performance issues you still need a DBA. Because RDS only runs your database. It is up to you to make it fast.
You'll need an engineer with database skills, not a dedicated DBA. I haven't seen a small company with a full time DBA in well over a decade. If you can learn a programming language, you can learn about indexes and basic tuning parameters (buffer pool, cache, etc.)
Not only that, you can't just have one DBA. You need a team a them, otherwise that person is going to be on call 24/7, can never take a vacation, etc. Your probably looking at a minimum of 3.
The US DoD for sure.
Out of curiosity, who is your onprem provider?