Comment by tbarbugli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tbarbugli | Hacker News Reader

70% is still a pretty good deal.

Back when RDS did not have Postgresql supported, our dev team build something similar on top of EC2, EBS, Wal-e (S3) and XFS.

It was a lot of work to get all the moving parts working nicely; lot of testing to perfect all procedures and I can tell you, it was no fun at all when we got the instance shutdown email notification from AWS (or if you wanted to spin a new server from snapshot / upgrade instance type, ...)

Here's a list of things that you get with RDS:

- Somebody else will make sure that failover, snapshotting, backup recovery work. If you use EC2 this is going to be something you need to test periodically (unless you like bad surprises)

- Automated failover election mechanism

- Logging integrates with S3 out of the box

- Proxy (no need to run your own pgbouncer anymore)

- Engine upgrades work with replicase and multi-az failovers

The list is much longer than this but my point is: the amount of overhead that comes with running PG on EC2 is high and does not improve that much over time (probably the opposite is true if you consider that developers/DBAs come and go).

Not saying it’s a bad deal. RDS is a great service. I’m saying that suddenly doubling the cost of a service is not a good look unless the value delivered is also doubled. As a customer, in what situation would you find this acceptable?

I seem to miss something here? If RDS went from $0,465 to $0,342 per hour as shown in the table, that’s roughly a decrease by one third in cost for me. Where does the „suddenly doubling the cost“ part come from? Isn’t it that the total cost for me decrease, just not at the rate of other AWS offerings?

As much as AWS wants you to believe otherwise, the actual price of RDS as a value-add is its premium on top of EC2 pricing.

There was no sudden doubling. Prices were lowered just not to everyone's satisfaction or expectation.

> I’m saying that suddenly doubling the cost of a service is not a good look unless the value delivered is also doubled.

That's not how markets and pricing work. Prices can go up for any number of reasons, demand is high, demand is too low, past pricing was too aggressive. Amazon has historically been operated with very low profits, maybe Bezos wants to change that?

I'm not sure why you feel offended or deserve a certain price point. Go with some other cloud provider, and if it's too much work, well then there you have it: Amazon has just justified their RDS pricing.

AWS has always had high margins. And I don’t care if they are in a market position to dictate the short-term price, I believe it’s bad business over the long term. Charging more for the same thing is certainly not customer obsession.

Oh, and thanks for the middle school economics lesson.

We did the same, self hosted to Rds was so much easier. I didn’t think it had a proxy though, and the new proxy is still just MySQL, so still needs pgbouncer?

You are right. I am quite sure they will add support for PG as well but at the moment proxies are only for MySQL.

Just for my curiosity; did you use EBS or instance storage?

Back when we did this instance storage was much faster than EBS but the difference was not as dramatic as it can be these days. For example:

i3.2xlarge -> 180,000 write IOPS (4KB) 456$/month EBS 16TiB volume -> 16,000 IOPS (16KB) (more than 1,500$/month)

The difference in price and performance (NVMe can go much higher than this) could justify the EC2 self-hosted approach.

This was a while ago, maybe even before i families, but our boss refused to use ebs at the time because of the ebs failure a couple years before that. What changed his mind was a instance termination that took way to long to recover from, and there been a ton of ebs improvement since then

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