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Comment by sanderjd

11 hours ago

But is there a significant cost difference? I'm skeptical.

I hope this is the correct service, "Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL"? [1]

The main pair of PostgreSQL servers we have at work each have two 32-core (64-vthread) CPUs, so I think that's 128 vCPU each in AWS terms. They also have 768GiB RAM. This is more than we need, and you'll see why at the end, but I'll be generous and leave this as the default the calculator suggests, which is db.m5.12xlarge with 48 vCPU and 192GiB RAM.

That would cost $6559/month, or less if reserved which I assume makes sense in this case — $106400 for 3 years.

Each server has 2TB of RAID disk, of which currently 1TB is used for database data.

That is an additional $245/month.

"CloudWatch Database Insights" looks to be more detailed than the monitoring tool we have, so I will exclude that ($438/month) and exclude the auto-failover proxy as ours is a manual failover.

With the 3-year upfront cost this is $115000, or $192000 for 5 years.

Alternatively, buying two of yesterday's [2] list-price [3] Dell servers which I think are close enough is $40k with five years warranty (including next-business-day replacement parts as necessary).

That leaves $150000 for hosting, which as you can see from [4] won't come anywhere close.

We overprovision the DB server so it has the same CPU and RAM as our processing cluster nodes — that means we can swap things around in some emergency as we can easily handle one fewer cluster node, though this has never been necessary.

When the servers are out of warranty, depending on your business, you may be able to continue using them for a non-prod environment. Significant failures are still very unusual, but minor failures (HDDs) are more common and something we need to know how to handle anyway.

[1] https://www.voxility.com/colocation/prices