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Self-hosting is more a question of responsibility I'd say. I am running a couple of SaaS products and self-host at much better performance at a fraction of the cost of running this on AWS. It's amazing and it works perfectly fine.

For client projects, however, I always try and sell them on paying the AWS fees, simply because it shifts the responsibility of the hardware being "up" to someone else. It does not inherently solve the downtime problem, but it allows me to say, "we'll have to wait until they've sorted this out, Ikea and Disney are down, too."

Doesn't always work like that and isn't always a tried-and-true excuse, but generally lets me sleep much better at night.

With limited budgets, however, it's hard to accept the cost of RDS (and we're talking with at least one staging environment) when comparing it to a very tight 3-node Galera cluster running on Hetzner at barely a couple of bucks a month.

Or Cloudflare, titan at the front, being down again today and the past two days (intermittently) after also being down a few weeks ago and earlier this year as well. Also had SQS queues time out several times this week, they picked up again shortly, but it's not like those things ...never happen on managed environments. They happen quite a bit.

> but it allows me to say, "we'll have to wait until they've sorted this out, Ikea and Disney are down, too."

From my experience your client’s clients don’t care about this when they’re still otherwise up.

Yes but the fact that it's "not their fault" keeps the person from getting fired.

Don't underestimate the power of CYA

That's real microeconomics.

This is a major reason the cloud commands such a premium. It’s a way to make down time someone else’s problem.

The other factor is eliminating the “one guy who knows X” problem in IT. What happens if that person leaves or you have to let them go? But with managed infrastructure there’s a pool of people who know how to write terraform or click buttons and manage it and those are more interchangeable than someone’s DIY deployment. Worst case the cloud provider might sell you premium support and help. Might be expensive but you’re not down.

Lastly, there’s been an exodus of talent from IT. The problem is that anyone really good can become a coder and make more. So finding IT people at a reasonable cost who know how to really troubleshoot and root cause stuff and engineer good systems is very hard. The good ones command more of a programmer salary which makes the gap with cloud costs much smaller. Might as well just go managed cloud.

That is called "bus factor" or "lottery factor". If the one IT guy gets hit by a bus or wins the lottery and quits, what happens? You want a bus factor of two or more - Two people would have to get hit by a bus for the company to have a big problem

That argument does not hold when there is aws serverless pg available, which cost almost nothing for low traffic and is vastly superior to self hosting regarding observability, security, integration, backup ect...

There is no reason to self manage pg for dev / environnement.

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

"which cost almost nothing for low traffic" you invented the retort "what about high traffic" within your own message. I don't even necessarily mean user traffic either. But if you constantly have to sync new records over (as could be the case in any kind of timeseries use-case) the internal traffic could rack up costs quickly.

"vastly superior to self hosting regarding observability" I'd suggest looking into the cnpg operator for Postgres on Kubernetes. The builtin metrics and official dashboard is vastly superior to what I get from Cloudwatch for my RDS clusters. And the backup mechanism using Barman for database snapshots and WAL backups is vastly superior to AWS DMS or AWS's disk snapshots which aren't portable to a system outside of AWS if you care about avoiding vendor lock-in.

This was true for RDS serverless v1 which scaled to 0 but is no longer offered. V2 requires a minimum 0.5 ACU hourly commit ($40+ /mo).

V2 scales to zero as of last year.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-scaling-to...

It only scales down after a period of inactivity though - it’s not pay-per-request like other serverless offerings. DSQL looks to be more cost effective for small projects if you can deal with the deviations from Postgres.

Ah, good to know, I hadn't seen that V2 update. Looks like a min 5m inactivity to auto-pause (i.e., scale to 0), and any connection attempt (valid or not) resumes the DB.

Aurora serverless requires provisioned compute - it’s about $40/mo last time I checked.

You can still outsource up to VM level and handle everything else on you own.

Obviously it depends on the operational overhead of specific technology.

Over 20 year I've had lots of clients on self-hosted, even self-hosting SQL on the same VM as the webserver as you used to in the long distant past for low-usage web apps.

I have never, ever, ever had a SQL box go down. I've had a web server go down once. I had someone who probably shouldn't have had access to a server accidentally turn one off once.

The only major outage I've had (2/3 hours) was when the box was also self-hosting an email server and I accidentally caused it to flood itself with failed delivery notices with a deploy.

I may have cried a little in frustration and panic but it got fixed in the end.

I actually find using cloud hosted SQL in some ways harder and more complicated because it's such a confusing mess of cost and what you're actually getting. The only big complication is setting up backups, and that's a one-off task.

Disks go bad. RAID is nontrivial to set up. Hetzner had a big DC outage that lead to data loss.

Off site backups or replication would help, though not always trivial to fail over.

As someone who has set this up while not being a DBA or sysadmin.

Replication and backups really aren’t that difficult to setup properly with something like Postgres. You can also expose metrics around this to setup alerting if replication lag goes beyond a threshold you set or a backup didn’t complete. You do need to periodically test your backups but that is also good practice.

I am not saying something like RDS doesn’t have value but you are paying a huge premium for it. Once you get to more steady state owning your database totally makes sense. A cluster of $10-20 VPSes with NVMe drives can get really good performance and will take you a lot farther than you might expect.

Even easier with sqlite thanks to litestream.

For this kind of small scale setup, a reasonable backup strategy is all you need for that. The one critical part is that you actually verify your backups are done and work.

Hardware doesn't fail that often. A single server will easily run many years without any issues, if you are not unlucky. And many smaller setups can tolerate the downtime to rent a new server or VM and restore from backup.

So can the cloud, and cloud has had more major outages in the last 3 months than I've seen on self-hosted in 20 years.

Deploys these days take minutes so what's the problem if a disk does go bad? You lose at most a day of data if you go with the 'standard' overnight backups, and if it's mission critical, you will have already set up replicas, which again is pretty trivial and only slightly more complicated than doing it on cloud hosts.

Not as often as you might think. Hardware doesn’t fail like it used to.

Hardware also monitors itself reasonably well because the hosting providers use it.

It’s trivial to run a mirrored containers on two separate proxmox nodes because hosting providers use the same kind of stuff.

Offsite backups and replication? Also point and click and trivial with tools like Proxmox.

RAID is actually trivial to setup.l if you don’t compare it to doing it manually yourself from the command line. Again, tools like Proxmox make it point and click and 5 minutes of watching from YouTube.

If you want to find a solution our brain will find it. If we don’t we can find reasons not to.

> if you don’t compare it to doing it manually yourself

Even if you do ZFS makes this pretty trivial as well.

> Self-hosting is more a question of responsibility I'd say. I am running a couple of SaaS products and self-host at much better performance at a fraction of the cost of running this on AWS

It is. You need to answer the question: what are the consecuences of your service being down for lets say 4 hours or some security patch isn't properly applied or you have not followed the best practices in terms of security? Many people are technically unable, lack the time or the resources to be able to confidently address that question, hence paying for someone else to do it.

Your time is money though. You are saving money but giving up time.

Like everything, it is always cheaper to do it (it being cooking at home, cleaning your home, fixing your own car, etc) yourself (if you don't include the cost of your own time doing the service you normally pay someone else for).

> Like everything, it is always cheaper to do it (it being cooking at home, cleaning your home, fixing your own car, etc) yourself (if you don't include the cost of your own time doing the service you normally pay someone else for).

In a business context the "time is money" thing actually makes sense, because there's a reasonable likelihood that the business can put the time to a more profitable use in some other way. But in a personal context it makes no sense at all. Realistically, the time I spend cooking or cleaning was not going to earn me a dime no matter what else I did, therefore the opportunity cost is zero. And this is true for almost everyone out there.

Yea I agree.. better outsource product development, management, and everything else too by that narrative

That’s pretty reductive. By that logic the opposite extreme is just as true: if using managed services is just as bad as outsourcing everything else, then a business shouldn’t rent real estate either—every business should build and own their own facility. They should also never contract out janitorial work, nor should they retain outside law firms—they should hire and staff those departments internally, every time, no nuance allowed.

You see the issue?

Like, I’m all for not procuring things that it makes more sense to own/build (and I know most businesses have piss-poor instincts on which is which—hell, I work for the government! I can see firsthand the consequences of outsourcing decision making to contractors, rather than just outsourcing implementation).

But it’s very case-by-case. There’s no general rule like “always prefer self hosting” or “always rent real estate, never buy” that applies broadly enough to be useful.

I'll be reductive in conversations like this just to help push the pendulum back a little. The prevailing attitude seems (to me) like people find self-hosting mystical and occult, yet there's never been a better time to do it.

> But it’s very case-by-case. There’s no general rule like “always prefer self hosting” or “always rent real estate, never buy” that applies broadly enough to be useful.

I don't know if anyone remembers that irritating "geek code" thing we were doing a while back, but coming up with some kind of shorthand for whatever context we're talking about would be useful.

No argument here, that’s a fair and thoughtful response, and you’re not wrong regarding the prejudice against self-hosting (and for what it’s worth I absolutely come from the era where that was the default approach, have done it extensively, like it, and still do it/recommend it when it makes sense).

> “ geek code" thing we were doing a while back

Not sure what you’re referring to. “Shibboleet”, perhaps? https://xkcd.com/806/

So well said, I like the technique of taking their logic and turning it around, never seen that before but it’s smart.

Unironically - I agree. You should be outsourcing things that aren't your core competency. I think many people on this forum have a certain pride about doing this manually, but to me it wouldn't make sense in any other context.

Could you imagine accountants arguing that you shouldn't use a service like Paychex or Gusto and just run payroll manually? After all it's cheaper! Just spend a week tracking taxes, benefits and signing checks.

Self-hosting, to me, doesn't make sense unless you are 1.) doing something not offered by the cloud or a pathological use case 2.) or running a hobby project or 3.) you are in maintaince mode on the product. Otherwise your time is better spent on your core product - and if it isn't, you probably aren't busy enough. If the cost of your RDS cluster is so expensive relative to your traffic, you probably aren't charging enough or your business economics really don't make sense.

I've managed large database clusters (MySQL, Cassandra) on bare metal hardware in managed colo in the past. I'm well aware of the performance thats being left on the table and what the cost difference is. For the vast majority of businesses, optimizing for self hosting doesn't make sense, especially if you don't have PMF. For a company like 37signals, sure, product velocity probably is very high, and you have engineering cycles to spare. But if you aren't profitable, self hosting won't make you profitable, and your time is better spent elsewhere.

You can outsource everything, but outsourcing critical parts of the company may also put the existence of the company in the hand of a third-party. Is that an acceptable risk?

Control and risk management cost money, be that by self hosting or contracts. At some point it is cheaper to buy the competence and make it part of the company rather than outsource it.

I think you and I simply disagree about your database being a core/critical part of your stack. I believe RDS is good enough for most people, and the only advantage you would have in self hosting is shaving 33% off your instance bill. I'd probably go a step further and argue that Neon/CockroachDB Serverless is good enough for most people.

> I'd argue self-hosting is the right choice for basically everyone, with the few exceptions at both ends of the extreme:

> If you're just starting out in software & want to get something working quickly with vibe coding, it's easier to treat Postgres as just another remote API that you can call from your single deployed app

> If you're a really big company and are reaching the scale where you need trained database engineers to just work on your stack, you might get economies of scale by just outsourcing that work to a cloud company that has guaranteed talent in that area. The second full freight salaries come into play, outsourcing looks a bit cheaper.

This is funny. I'd argue the exact opposite. I would self host only:

* if I were on a tight budget and trading an hour or two of my time for a cost saving of a hundred dollars or so is a good deal; or

* at a company that has reached the scale where employing engineers to manage self-hosted databases is more cost effective than outsourcing.

I have nothing against self-hosting PostgreSQL. Do whatever you prefer. But to me outsourcing this to cloud providers seems entirely reasonable for small and medium-sized businesses. According to the author's article, self hosting costs you between 30 and 120 minutes per month (after setup, and if you already know what to do). It's easy to do the math...

> employing engineers to manage self-hosted databases is more cost effective than outsourcing

Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers to deal with its complexity. The "cloud" reducing staff costs is and was always a lie.

PaaS platforms (Heroku, Render, Railway) can legitimately be operated by your average dev and not have to hire a dedicated person; those cost even more though.

Another limitation of both the cloud and PaaS is that they are only responsible for the infrastructure/services you use; they will not touch your application at all. Can your application automatically recover from a slow/intermittent network, a DB failover (that you can't even test because your cloud providers' failover and failure modes are a black box), and so on? Otherwise you're waking up at 3am no matter what.

> Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers

Every company beyond a particular size surely? For many small and medium sized companies hiring an infrastructure team makes just as little sense as hiring kitchen staff to make lunch.

You're paying people to do the role either way, if it's not dedicated staff then it's taking time away from your application developers so they can play the role of underqualified architects, sysadmins, security engineers.

Yeah, and nobody is looking at the other side of this. There just are not a lot of good DBA/sysop type who even want to work for some non-tech SMB. So this either gets outsourced to the cloud, or some junior dev or desktop support guy hacks it together. And then who knows if the backups are even working.

Fact is a lot of these companies are on the cloud because their internal IT was a total fail.

If they just paid half of the markup they currently pay for the cloud I'm sure they'll be swimming in qualified candidates.

For companies not heavily into tech, lots of this stuff is not that expensive. Again, how many DBAs are even looking for a 3 hr/month sidegig?

From experience (because I used to do this), it’s a lot less time than a self-hosted solution, once you’re factoring in the multiple services that need to be maintained.

As someone who has done both.. i disagree, i find self hosting to a degree much easier and much less complex

Local reproducibility is easier, and performance is often much better

It depends entirely on your use case. If all you need is a DB and Python/PHP/Node server behind Nginx then you can get away with that for a long time. Once you throw in a task runner, emails, queue systems, blob storage, user-uploaded content, etc. you can start running beyond your own ability or time to fix the inevitable problems.

As I pointed out above, you may be better served mixing and matching so you spend your time on the critical aspects but offload those other tasks to someone else.

Of course, I’m not sitting at your computer so I can’t tell you what’s right for you.

I mean, fair, we are ofc offloading some of that.. email being one of those, LLM`s being another thing.

Task runner/que at least for us postgres works for both cases.

We also self host an s3 storage and allow useruploaded content in within strict borders.

For small companies things like vercel, supabase, firebase, ... wipe the floor with Amazon RDS.

For medium sized companies you need "devops engineers". And in all honesty, more than you'd need sysadmins for the same deployment.

For large companies, they split up AWS responsibilities into entire departments of teams (for example, all clouds have math auth so damn difficult most large companies have -not 1- but multiple departments just dealing with authorization, before you so much as start your first app)

Well sure you still have 2 or 3 infra people but now you don’t need 15. Comparing to modern Hetzner is also not fair to “cloud” in the sense that click-and-get-server didn’t exist until cloud providers popped up. That was initially the whole point. If bare metal behind an API existed in 2009 the whole industry would look very different. Contingencies Rule Everything Around Me.

> Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers to deal with its complexity. The "cloud" reducing staff costs is and was always a lie.

This doesn’t make sense as an argument. The reason the cloud is more complex is because that complexity is available. Under a certain size, a large number of cloud products simply can’t be managed in-house (and certainly not altogether).

Also your argument is incorrect in my experience.

At a smaller business I worked at, I was able to use these services to achieve uptime and performance that I couldn’t achieve self-hosted, because I had to spend time on the product itself. So yeah, we’d saved on infrastructure engineers.

At larger scales, what your false dichotomy suggests also doesn’t actually happen. Where I work now, our data stores are all self-managed on top of EC2/Azure, where performance and reliability are critical. But we don’t self-host everything. For example, we use SES to send our emails and we use RDS for our app DB, because their performance profiles and uptime guarantees are more than acceptable for the price we pay. That frees up our platform engineers to spend their energy on keeping our uptime on our critical services.

>At a smaller business I worked at, I was able to use these services to achieve uptime and performance that I couldn’t achieve self-hosted, because I had to spend time on the product itself. So yeah, we’d saved on infrastructure engineers.

How sure are you about that one? All of my hetzner vm`s reach an uptime if 99.9% something.

I could see more then one small business stack fitting onto a single of those vm`s.

100% certain because I started by self hosting before moving to AWS services for specific components and improved the uptime and reduced the time I spent keeping those services alive.

What was work you spend configuring those services and keeping them alive? I am genuinely curious...

We have a very limited set of services, but most have been very painless to maintain.

A Django+Celery app behind Nginx back in the day. Most maintenance would be discovering a new failure mode:

- certificates not being renewed in time

- Celery eating up all RAM and having to be recycled

- RabbitMQ getting blocked requiring a forced restart

- random issues with Postgres that usually required a hard restart of PG (running low on RAM maybe?)

- configs having issues

- running out of inodes

- DNS not updating when upgrading to a new server (no CDN at the time)

- data centre going down, taking the provider’s email support with it (yes, really)

Bear in mind I’m going back a decade now, my memory is rusty. Each issue was solvable but each would happen at random and even mitigating them was time that I (a single dev) was not spending on new features or fixing bugs.

I mean, going back a decade might be part of the reason?

Configs having issues is like number 1 reason i like the setup so much..

I can configure everything on my local machine and test here, and then just deploy it to a server the same way.

I do not have to build a local setup, and then a remote one

Er… what? Even in today’s world with Docker, you have differences between dev and prod. For a start, one is accessed via the internet and requires TLS configs to work correctly. The other is accessed via localhost.

Just because your VM is running doesn't mean the service is accessible. Whenever there's a large AWS outage it's usually not because the servers turned off. It also doesn't guarantee that your backups are working properly.

If you have a server where everything is on the server, the server being on means everything is online... There is not a lot of complexity going on inside a single server infrastructure.

I mean just because you have backups does not mean you can restore them ;-)

We do test backup restoration automatically and also on a quarterly basis manually, but so you should do with AWS.

Otherwise how do you know you can restore system a without impact other dependency, d and c

Yes, mix-and-match is the way to go, depending on what kind of skills are available in your team. I wouldn't touch a mail server with a 10-foot pole, but I'll happily self-manage certain daemons that I'm comfortable with.

Just be careful not to accept more complexity just because it is available, which is what the AWS evangelists often try to sell. After all, we should always make an informed decision when adding a new dependency, whether in code or in infrastructure.

Of course AWS are trying to sell you everything. It’s still on you and your team to understand your product and infrastructure and decide what makes sense for you.

In-house vs Cloud Provider is largely a wash in terms of cost. Regardless of the approach, you are going need people to maintain stuff and people cost money. Similarly compute and storage cost money so what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts.

In my experience you typically need less people if using a Cloud Provider than in-house (or the same number of people can handle more instances) due to increased leverage. Whether you can maximize what you get via leverage depends on how good your team is.

US companies typically like to minimize headcount (either through accounting tricks or outsourcing) so usually using a Cloud Provider wins out for this reason alone. It's not how much money you spend, it's how it looks on the balance sheet ;)

> still employs infrastructure engineers

> The "cloud" reducing staff costs

Both can be true at the same time.

Also:

> Otherwise you're waking up at 3am no matter what.

Do you account for frequency and variety of wakeups here?

> Do you account for frequency and variety of wakeups here?

Yes. In my career I've dealt with way more failures due to unnecessary distributed systems (that could have been one big bare-metal box) rather than hardware failures.

You can never eliminate wake-ups, but I find bare-metal systems to have much less moving parts means you eliminate a whole bunch of failure scenarios so you're only left with actual hardware failure (and HW is pretty reliable nowadays).

If this isn't the truth. I just spent several weeks, on and off, debugging a remote hosted build system tool thingy because it was in turn made of at least 50 different microservice type systems and it was breaking in the middle of two of them.

There was, I have to admit, a log message that explained the problem... once I could find the specific log message and understand the 45 steps in the chain that got to that spot.

Working in a university Lab self-hosting is the default for almost anything. While I would agree that cost are quite low, I sometimes would be really happy to throw money at problems to make them go away. Without having the chance and thus being no expert, I really see the opportunity of scaling (up and down) quickly in the cloud. We ran a postgres database of a few 100 GB with multiple read replica and we managed somehow, but actually really hit our limits of expertise at some point. At some point we stopped migrating to newer database schemas because it was just such a hassle keeping availability. If I had the money as company, I guess I would have paid for a hosted solution.

I don’t think it’s a lie, it’s just perhaps overstated. The number of staff needed to manage a cloud infrastructure is definitely lower than that required to manage the equivalent self-hosted infrastructure.

Whether or not you need that equivalence is an orthogonal question.

> The number of staff needed to manage a cloud infrastructure is definitely lower than that required to manage the equivalent self-hosted infrastructure.

There's probably a sweet spot where that is true, but because cloud providers offer more complexity (self-inflicted problems) and use PR to encourage you to use them ("best practices" and so on) in all the cloud-hosted shops I've been in a decade of experience I've always seen multiple full-time infra people being busy with... something?

There was always something to do, whether to keep up with cloud provider changes/deprecations, implementing the latest "best practice", debugging distributed systems failures or self-inflicted problems and so on. I'm sure career/resume polishing incentives are at play here too - the employee wants the system to require their input otherwise their job is no longer needed.

Maybe in a perfect world you can indeed use cloud-hosted services to reduce/eliminate dedicated staff, but in practice I've never seen anything but solo founders actually achieve that.

Exactly. Companies with cloud infra often still have to hire infra people or even an infra team, but that team will be smaller than if they were self-hosting everything, in some cases radically smaller.

I love self-hosting stuff and even have a bias towards it, but the cost/time tradeoff is more complex than most people think.

You are missing that most services don't have high availability needs and don't need to scale.

Most projects I have worked on in my career have never seen more than a hundred concurrent users. If something goes down on Saturday, I am going to fix it on Monday.

I have worked on internal tools were I just added a postgres DB to the docker setup and that was it. 5 Minute of work and no issues at all. Sure if you have something customer facing, you need to do a bit more and setup a good backup strategy but that really isn't magic.

| self hosting costs you between 30 and 120 minutes per month

Can we honestly say that cloud services taking a half hour to two hours a month of someone's time on average is completely unheard of?

I handle our company's RDS instances, and probably spend closer to 2 hours a year than 2 hours a month over the last 8 years.

It's definitely expensive, but it's not time-consuming.

Very much depends on what you're doing in the cloud, how many services you are using, and how frequently those services and your app needs updates.

its not. I've been in a few shops that use RDS because they think their time is better spend doing other things.

except now they are stuck trying to maintain and debug Postgres without having the same visibility and agency that they would if they hosted it themselves. situation isn't at all clear.

One thing unaccounted for if you've only ever used cloud-hosted DBs is just how slow they are compared to a modern server with NVME storage.

This leads the developers to do all kinds of workarounds and reach for more cloud services (and then integrating them and - often poorly - ensuring consistency across them) because the cloud hosted DB is not able to handle the load.

On bare-metal, you can go a very long way with just throwing everything at Postgres and calling it a day.

This is the reason I manage SQL Server on a VM in Azure instead of their PaaS offering. The fully managed SQL has terrible performance unless you drop many thousands a month. The VM I built is closer to 700 a month.

Running on IaaS also gives you more scalability knobs to tweak: SSD Iops and b/w, multiple drives for logs/partitions, memory optimized VMs, and there's a lot of low level settings that aren't accessible in managed SQL. Licensing costs are also horrible with managed SQL Server, where it seems like you pay the Enterprise level, but running it yourself offers lower cost editions like Standard or Web.

100% this directly connected nvme is a massive win. Often several orders of magnitude.

You can take it even further in some context if you use sqlite.

I think one of the craziest ideas of the cloud decade was to move storage away from compute. It's even worse with things like AWS lambda or vercel.

Now vercel et al are charging you extra to have your data next to your compute. We're basically back to VMs at 100-1000x the cost.

Yeah our cloud DBs all have abysmal performance and high recurring cost even compared to metal we didn't even buy for hosting DBs.

Interesting. Is this an issue with RDS?

I use Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and it's been rock solid. No issues; troubleshooting works fine; all extensions we need already installed; can adjust settings where needed.

its more of a general condition - its not that RDS is somehow really faulty, its just that when things do go wrong, its not really anybody's job to introspect the system because RDS is taking care of it for us.

in the limit I dont think we should need DBAs, but as long as we need to manage indices by hand, think more than 10 seconds about the hot queries, manage replication, tune the vacuumer, track updates, and all the other rot - then actually installing PG on a node of your choice is really the smallest of problems you face.

The discussion isn't "what is more effective". The discussion is "who wants to be blamed in case things go south". If you push the decision to move to self-hosted and then one of the engineers fucks up the database, you have a serious problem. If same engineer fucks up cloud database, it's easier to save your own ass.

So, yeah, I guess there's much confusion about what a 'managed database' actually is? Because for me, the table stakes are:

-Backups: the provider will push a full generic disaster-recovery backup of my database to an off-provider location at least daily, without the need for a maintenance window

-Optimization: index maintenance and storage optimization are performed automatically and transparently

-Multi-datacenter failover: my database will remain available even if part(s) of my provider are down, with a minimal data loss window (like, 30 seconds, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, depending on SLA and thus plan expenditure)

-Point-in-time backups are performed at an SLA-defined granularity and with a similar retention window, allowing me to access snapshots via a custom DSN, not affecting production access or performance in any way

-Slow-query analysis: notifying me of relevant performance bottlenecks before they bring down production

-Storage analysis: my plan allows for #GB of fast storage, #TB of slow storage: let me know when I'm forecast to run out of either in the next 3 billing cycles or so

Because, well, if anyone provides all of that for a monthly fee, the whole "self-hosting" argument goes out of the window quickly, right? And I say that as someone who absolutely adores self-hosting...

It's even worse when you start finding you're staffing specialized skills. You have the Postgres person, and they're not quite busy enough, but nobody else wants to do what they do. But then you have an issue while they're on vacation, and that's a problem. Now I have a critical service but with a bus factor problem. So now I staff two people who are now not very busy at all. One is a bit ambitious and is tired of being bored. So he's decided we need to implement something new in our Postgres to solve a problem we don't really have. Uh oh, it doesn't work so well, the two spend the next six months trying to work out the kinks with mixed success.

Slack is a necessary component in well functioning systems.

And rental/SaaS models often provide an extremely cost effective alternative to needing to have a lot of slack.

Corollary: rental/SaaS models provide that property in large part because their providers have lots of slack.

Of course! It should be included in the math when comparing in-housing Postgres vs using a managed service.

This would be a strange scenario because why would you keep these people employed? If someone doesn't want to do the job required, including servicing Postgres, then they wouldn't be with me any longer, I'll find someone who does.

IMO, the reason to self-host your database is latency.

Yes, I'd say backups and analysis are table stakes for hiring it, and multi-datacenter failover is a relevant nice to have. But the reason to do it yourself is because it's literally impossible to get anything as good as you can build in somebody's else computer.

Yup, often orders of magnitude better.

If you set it up right, you can automate all this as well by self hosting. There is really nothing special about automating backups or multi region fail over.

But then you have to check that these mechanisms work regularly and manually

One thing I learned working in the industry, you have to check them when you're using AWS too.

Really? You're saying RDS backups can't be trusted?

No backup strategy can be blindly trusted. You must verify it, and also test that restores actually work.

Trusted in what sense, that they'll always work perfectly 100% of the time? No, therefore one must still check them from time to time, and it's really no different when self hosting, again, if you do it correctly.

What are some common ways that RDS backups fail to be restored?

Why are you asking me this? Are you trying to test whether I've actually used RDS before? I'm sure a quick search will find you the answer to your question.

Self-host things the boss won't call at 3 AM about: logs, traces, exceptions, internal apps, analytics. Don't self-host the database or major services.

Yugabyte open source covers a lot of this

Which providers do all of that?

I don't know which don't?

The default I've used on Amazon and GCP both do (RDS, Cloud SQL)

There should be no data loss window with a hosted database

That requires synchronous replication, which reduces availability and performance.

Feom what I remember if AWS loses your data they are basically give you some credits and that's it.

Why is that?

The author brings up the point, but I have always found surprising how much more expensive managed databases are than a comparable VPS.

I would expect a little bit more as a cost of the convenience, but in my experience it's generally multiple times the expense. It's wild.

This has kept me away from managed databases in all but my largest projects.

Once they convince you that you can’t do it yourself, you end up relying on them, but didn’t develop the skills you would need to migrate to another provider when they start raising prices. And they keep raising prices because by then you have no choice.

There is plenty of provider markup, to be sure. But it is also very much not a given that the hosted version of a database is running software/configs that are equivalent to what you could do yourself. Many hosted databases are extremely different behind the scenes when it comes to durability, monitoring, failover, storage provisioning, compute provisioning, and more. Just because it acts like a connection hanging off a postmaster service running on a server doesn’t mean that’s what your “psql” is connected to on RDS Aurora (or many of the other cloud-Postgres offerings).

> Just because it acts like a connection hanging off

If anything that’s a feature for ease of use and compatibility.

Wait, are you talking about cloud providers or LLMs?

I have not tested this in real life yet but it seems like all the argument about vendor lock in can be solved, if you bite the bullet and learn basic Kubernetes administration. Kubernetes is FOSS and there are countless Kubernetes as a service providers.

I know there are other issues with Kubernetes but at least its transferable knowledge.

Take a look at https://github.com/vitabaks/autobase

In case you want to self host but also have something that takes care of all that extra work for you

Just skimmed the readme. What's the connection pooling situation here? Or is it out of scope?

I wonder how well this plays with other self hosted open source PaaS, is it just a Docker container we can run I assume?

Thank you, this looks awesome.

I still don't get how folks can hype Postgres with every second post on HN, yet there is no simple batteries-included way to run a HA Postgres cluster with automatic failover like you can do with MongoDB. I'm genuinely curious how people deal with this in production when they're self-hosting.

Beyond the hype, the PostgreSQL community is aware of the lack of "batteries-included" HA. This discussion on the idea of a Built-in Raft replication mentions MongoDB as:

>> "God Send". Everything just worked. Replication was as reliable as one could imagine. It outlives several hardware incidents without manual intervention. It allowed cluster maintenance (software and hardware upgrades) without application downtime. I really dream PostgreSQL will be as reliable as MongoDB without need of external services.

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/0e01fb4d-f8ea-4ca9-8c9...

"I really dream PostgreSQL will be as reliable as MongoDB" ... someone needs to go and read up on Mongo's history!

Sure, the PostrgreSQL HA story isn't what we all want it to be, but the reliability is exceptional.

Postgres violated serializability on a single node for a considerable amount of time [1] and used fsync incorrectly for 20 years [2]. I personally witnessed lost data on Postgres because of the fsync issue.

Database engineering is very hard. MongoDB has had both poor defaults as well as bugs in the past. It will certainly have durability bugs in the future, just like Postgres and all other serious databases. I'm not sure that Postgres' durability stacks up especially well with modern MongoDB.

[1] https://jepsen.io/analyses/postgresql-12.3

[2] https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/postgresql_fs...

If you’re running Kubernetes, CloudNativePG seems to be the “batteries included” HA Postgres cluster that’s becoming the standard in this area.

CloudNativePG is automation around PostgreSQL, not "batteries included", and not the idea of Kubernetes where pods can die or spawn without impacting the availability. Unfortunately, naming it Cloud Native doesn't transform a monolithic database to an elastic cluster

It's largely cultural. In the SQL world, people are used to accepting the absence of real HA (resilience to failure, where transactions continue without interruption) and instead rely on fast DR (stop the service, recover, check for data loss, start the service). In practice, this means that all connections are rolled back, clients must reconnect to a replica known to be in synchronous commit, and everything restarts with a cold cache.

Yet they still call it HA because there's nothing else. Even a planned shutdown of the primary to patch the OS results in downtime, as all connections are terminated. The situation is even worse for major database upgrades: stop the application, upgrade the database, deploy a new release of the app because some features are not compatible between versions, test, re-analyze the tables, reopen the database, and only then can users resume work.

Everything in SQL/RDBMS was thought for a single-node instance, not including replicas. It's not HA because there can be only one read-write instance at a time. They even claim to be more ACID than MongoDB, but the ACID properties are guaranteed only on a single node.

One exception is Oracle RAC, but PostgreSQL has nothing like that. Some forks, like YugabyteDB, provide real HA with most PostgreSQL features.

About the hype: many applications that run on PostgreSQL accept hours of downtime, planned or unplanned. Those who run larger, more critical applications on PostgreSQL are big companies with many expert DBAs who can handle the complexity of database automation. And use logical replication for upgrades. But no solution offers both low operational complexity and high availability that can be comparable to MongoDB

The most common way to achieve HÁ is using Patroni. The easiest way to set it up is using Autobase (https://autobase.tech).

CloudNativePG (https://cloudnative-pg.io) is a great option if you’re using Kubernetes.

There’s also pg_auto_failover which is a Postgres extension and a bit less complex than the alternatives, but it has its drawbacks.

Be sure to read the Муths and Truths about Synchronous Replication in PostgreSQL (by the author of Patroni) before considering those solutions as cloud-native high availability: https://www.postgresql.eu/events/pgconfde2025/sessions/sessi...

Because that’s an expensive and complex boondoggle almost no business needs.

Patroni, Zolando operator on k8s

RDS provides some HA. HAProxy or PGBouncer can help when self hosting.

it's easy to through names out like this (pgbackrest is also useful...) but getting them setup properly in a production environment is not at all straightforward, which I think is the point.

…in which case, you should probably use a hosted offering that takes care of those things for you. RDS Aurora (Serverless or not), Neon, and many other services offer those properties without any additional setup. They charge a premium for them, however.

It’s not like Mongo gives you those properties for free either. Replication/clustering related data loss is still incredibly common precisely because mongo makes it seem like all that stuff is handled automatically at setup when in reality it requires plenty of manual tuning or extra software in order to provide the guarantees everyone thinks it does.

Yeah my hope is that the core team will adopt a built in solution, much as they finally came around on including logical replication.

Until then it is nice to have options, even if they do require extra steps.

I’ve been tempted by MariaDB for this reason. I’d love to hear from anyone who has run both.

IMO Maria has fallen behind MySQL. I wouldn't chose it for anything my income depends on.

(I do use Maria at home for legacy reasons, and have used MySQL and Pg professionally for years.)

> IMO Maria has fallen behind MySQL. I wouldn't chose it for anything my income depends on.

Can you give any details on that?

I switched to MariaDB back in the day for my personal projects because (so far as I could tell) it was being updated more regularly, and it was more fully open source. (I don't recall offhand at this point whether MySQL switched to a fully paid model, or just less-open.)

One area where Maria lags significantly is JSON support. In MariaDB, JSON is just an alias for LONGTEXT plus validation: https://mariadb.com/docs/server/reference/data-types/string-...

IME MariaDB doesn't recover or run as reliably as modern versions of MySQL, at least with InnoDB.

I use Patroni for that in a k8s environment (although it works anywhere). I get an off-the-shelf declarative deployment of an HA postgres cluster with automatic failover with a little boiler-plate YAML.

Patroni has been around for awhile. The database-as-a-service team where I work uses it under the hood. I used it to build database-as-a-service functionality on the infra platform team I was at prior to that.

It's basially push-button production PG.

There's at least one decent operator framework leveraging it, if that's your jam. I've been living and dying by self-hosting everything with k8s operators for about 6-7 years now.

We use patroni and run it outside of k8s on prem, no issues in 6 or 7 years. Just upgraded from pg 12 to 17 with basically no down time without issue either.

What irks me about so many comments in this thread is that they often totally ignore questions of scale, the shape of your workloads, staffing concerns, time constraints, stage of your business, whether you require extensions, etc.

There is a whole raft of reasons why you might be a candidate for self-hosting, and a whole raft of reasons why not. This article is deeply reductive, and so are many of the comments.

Engineers almost never consider any of those questions. And instead deploy the maximally expensive solution their boss will say ok to.

Bad, short-sighted engineers will do that. An engineer who is not acting solely in the best interests of the wider organisation is a bad one. I would not want to work with a colleague who was so detached from reality that they wouldn't consider all GP's suggested facets. Engineering includes soft/business constraints as well as technical ones.

We are saying similar things.

Ah, you are implying that most engineers are bad, I see. In that case I agree too

since this is on the front page (again?) I guess I'll chime in: learn kubernetes - it's worth it. It did take me 3 attempts at it to finally wrap my head around it I really suggest trying out many different things and see what works for you.

And I really recommend starting with *default* k3s, do not look at any alternatives to cni, csi, networked storage - treat your first cluster as something that can spontaniously fail and don't bother keeping it clean learn as much as you can.

Once you have that, you can use great open-source k8s native controllers which take care of vast majority of requirements when it comes to self-hosting and save more time in the long run than it took to set up and learn these things.

Honerable mentions: k9s, lens(I do not suggest using it in the long-term, but UI is really good as a starting point), rancher webui.

PostgreSQL specifically: https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/cloudnative-pg If you really want networked storage: https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn

I do not recommend ceph unless you are okay with not using shared filesystems as they have a bunch of gotchas or if you want S3 without having to install a dedicated deployment for it.

Check out canine.sh, it's to Kubernetes what Coolify or Dokploy is to Docker, if you're familiar with self hosted open source PaaS.

And on a similar naming note yet totally unrelated, check out k9s, which is a TUI for Kubernetes cluster admin. All kinds of nifty features built-in, and highly customizable.

If we're talking about CLIs, check out Kamal, the build system that 37signals / Basecamp / DHH developed, specifically to move off the cloud. I think it uses Kubernetes but not positive, it might just be Docker.

It's just Docker - it SSH's in to the target servers and runs `docker` commands as needed.

I just push to git where there is a git action to automatically synchronize deployments

At $WORK we’ve been using the Zalando Postgres kubernetes operator to great success: https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator

As someone who has operated Postgres clusters for over a decade before k8s was even a thing, I fully recommend just using a Postgres operator like this one and moving on. The out of box config is sane, it’s easy to override things, and failover/etc has been working flawlessly for years. It’s just the right line between total DIY and the simplicity of having a hosted solution. Postgres is solved, next problem.

For something like a database, what is the added advantage to using Kubernetes as opposed to something simple like Docker Compose?

In this case the advantage are operators for running postgres.

With Docker Compose, the abstraction level you're dealing with is containers, which means in this case you're saying "run the postgres image and mount the given config and the given data directory". When running the service, you need to know how to operate the software within the container.

Kubernetes at its heart is an extensible API Server, which allows so called "operators" to create custom resources and react to them. In the given case, this means that a postgres operator defines for example a PostgresDatabaseCluster resource, and then contains control loops to turn these resources into actual running containers. That way, you don't necessarily need to know how postgres is configured and that it requires a data directory mount. Instead, you create a resource that says "give me a postgres 15 database with two instances for HA fail-over", and the operator then goes to work and manages the underlying containers and volumes.

Essentially operators in kubernetes allow you to manage these services at a much higher level.

The assumption is that you’re already using Kubernetes, sorry.

Docker compose has always been great for running some containers on a local machine, but I’ve never found it to be great for deployments with lots of physical nodes. k8s is certainly complex, but the complexity really pays off for larger deployments IMO.

Docker Compose (ignoring Swarm which seems to be obsolete) manages containers on a single machine. With Kubernetes, the pod that hosts the database is a pod like any other (I assume). It gets moved to a healthy machine when node goes bad, respects CPU/mem limits, works with generic monitoring tools, can be deployed from GitOps tools etc. All the k8s goodies apply.

When it comes to a DB moving the process around is easy, it's the data that matters. The reason bare-metal-hosted DBs are so fast is that they use direct-attach storage instead of networked storage. You lose those speed advantages if you move to distributed storage (Ceph/etc).

You don’t need to use networked storage, the zalando postgres operator just uses local storage on the host. It uses a StatefulSet underneath so that pods will stay on the same node until you migrate them.

But if I'm pinning it to dedicated machines then Kubernetes does not give me anything, but I still have to deal with its tradeoffs and moving parts - which from experience are more likely to bring me down than actual hardware failure.

I hate that this is starting to sound like a bot Q&A, but the primary advantages is that it provides secure remote configuration and it's that it's platform agnostic, multi-node orchestration, built in load balancing and services framework, way more networking control than docker, better security, self healing and the list goes on, you have to read more about it to really understand the advantages over docker.

Any good recommendations you got for learning kubernetes for busy people?

No path for busy people, unfortunately. Learn everything from ground up, from containers to Compose to k3s, maybe to kubeadm or hosted. Huge abstraction layers coming from Kubernetes serve their purpose well, but can screw you up when anything goes slightly wrong on the upper layer.

For start, ignore operators, ignore custom CSI/CNI, ignore IAM/RBAC. Once you feel good in the basics, you can expand.

k3sup a cluster, ask an AI on how to serve an nginx static site using trafeik on it and explain every step of it and what it does (it should provide: a config map, a deployment, a service and an ingress)

k3s provides: csi, cni (cluster storage interface, cluster network interface) which is flannel and and local-pv which just maps volumes to disk (pvcs)

trafeik is what routes your traffic from the outside to inside your cluster (to an ingress resource)

Are you working on websites with millions of hourly visits?

I'm probably just an idiot, but I ran unmanaged postgres on Fly.io, which is basically self hosting on a vm, and it wasn't fun.

I did this for just under two years, and I've lost count of how many times one or more of the nodes went down and I had to manually deregister it from the cluster with repmgr, clone a new vm and promote a healthy node to primary. I ended up writing an internal wiki page with the steps. I never got it: if one of the purposes of clusters is having higher availability, why did repmgr not handle zombie primaries?

Again, I'm probably just an idiot out of my depth with this. And I probably didn't need a cluster anyway, although with the nodes failing like they did, I didn't feel comfortable moving to a single node setup as well.

I eventually switched to managed postgres, and it's amazing being able to file a sev1 for someone else to handle when things go down, instead of the responsibility being on me.

Assuming you are using fly's managed postgres now?

Yep

From my point of view the real challenge comes when you want high availability and need to setup a Postgres cluster.

With MongoDB you simply create a replicaset and you are done.

When planing a Postgres cluster, you need to understand replication options, potentially deal with Patroni. Zalandos Docker Spilo image is not really maintained, the way to go seems CloudNativePG, but that requires k8s.

I still don’t understand why there is no easy built-in Postgres cluster solution.

I have ran (read: helped with infrastructure) a small production service using PSQL for 6 years, with up to hundreds of users per day. PSQL has been the problem exactly once, and it was because we ran out of disk space. Proper monitoring (duh) and a little VACUUM would have solved it.

Later I ran a v2 of that service on k8s. The architecture also changed a lot, hosting many smaller servers sharing the same psql server(Not really microservice-related, think more "collective of smaller services ran by different people"). I have hit some issues relating to maxing out the max connections, but that's about it.

This is something I do on my free time so SLA isn't an issue, meaning I've had the ability to learn the ropes of running PSQL without many bad consequences. I'm really happy I have had this opportunity.

My conclusion is that running PSQL is totally fine if you just set up proper monitoring. If you are an engineer that works with infrastructure, even just because nobody else can/wants to, hosting PSQL is probably fine for you. Just RTFM.

But it’s 1500 pages long!

I've been self hosting Postgresql for 12+ years at this point. Directly on bare metal then and now in a container with CapRover.

I have a cron sh script to backup to S3 (used to be ftp).

It's not "business grade" but it has also actually NEVER failed. Well once, but I think it was more the container or a swarm thing. I just destroyed and recreated it and it picked up the same volume fine.

The biggest pain point is upgrading as Postgresql can't upgrade the data without the previous version installed or something. It's VERY annoying.

And if you want a supabase-like functionality, I'm a huge fan of PostgREST (which is actually how supabase works/worked under the hood). Make a view for your application and boom, you have a GET only REST API. Add a plpgsql function, and now you can POST. It uses JWT for auth, but usually I have application on the same VLAN as DB so it's not as rife for abuse.

You can self host Supabase too.

Last time I checked, it was a pain in the ass to self-host it

I've been self hosting it for 20 years. Best technical decision I ever made. Rock solid

I've been selfhosting it for at least 10 years, it and mysql, mysql longer. No issues selfhosting either. I have backups and I know they work.

What server company are you guys using with high reliability? Looking for server in US-East right now.

I hosted PostgreSQL professionally for over a decade.

Overall, a good experience. Very stable service and when performance issues did periodically arise, I like that we had full access to all details to understand the root cause and tune details.

Nobody was employeed as a full-time DBA. We had plenty of other things going on in addition to running PostgreSQL.

I'd argue forget about Postgres completely. If you can shell out $90/month, the only database you should use is GCP Spanner (yes, this also means forget about any mega cloud other than GCP unless you're fine paying ingress and egress).

And for small projects, SQLite, rqlite, or etcd.

My logic is either the project is important enough that data durability matters to you and sees enough scale that loss of data durability would be a major pain in the ass to fix, or the project is not very big and you can tolerate some lost committed transactions.

A consensus-replication-less non-embedded database has no place in 2025.

This is assuming you have relational needs. For non-relational just use the native NoSQL in your cloud, e.g. DynamoDB in AWS.

You seem insanely miscalibrated. $90 gets you a dedicated server that covers most projects' needs. data durability isnt some magic that only cloud providers can get you.

I think we can get to the point where we have self-hosted agents that can manage db maintenance and recovery. There could be regular otel -> * -> Grafana -> ~PagerDuty -> you and TriageBot which would call specialists to gather state and orchestrate a response.

Scripts could kick off health reports and trigger operations. Upgrades and recovery runbooks would be clearly defined and integration tested.

It would empower personal sovereignty.

Someone should make this in the open. Maybe it already exists, there are a lot of interesting agentops projects.

If that worked 60% of the time and I had to figure out the rest, I’d self host that. I’d pay for 80%+.

this is basically supabase. their entire stack (and product) can be hosted as a series of something like 10+ docker containers:

https://supabase.com/docs/guides/self-hosting/docker

however, like always, 'complexity has to live somewhere'. I doubt even Opus 4.5 could handle this. as soon as you get into database records themselves, context is going to blow up and you're going to have a bad time

What do you postgres self hosters use for performance analysis? Both GCP-SQL and RDS have their performance analysis pieces of the hosted DB and it's incredible. Probably my favorite reason for using them.

I use pgdash and netdata for monitoring and alerting, and plain psql for analyzing specific queries.

I’ve been very happy with Pganalyze.

> Take AWS RDS. Under the hood, it's:

    Standard Postgres compiled with some AWS-specific monitoring hooks
    A custom backup system using EBS snapshots
    Automated configuration management via Chef/Puppet/Ansible
    Load balancers and connection pooling (PgBouncer)
    Monitoring integration with CloudWatch
    Automated failover scripting

The problem i find with RDS (and most other managed Postgres) is that they limit your options for how you want to design your database architecture. For instance, if write consistency is important to you want to support synchronous replication, there is no way to do this in RDS without either Aurora or having the readers in another AZ. The other issue is that you only have access to logical replication, because you don't have access to your WAL archive, so it makes moving off RDS much more difficult.

> I didn't know RDS had PgBouncer under the hood

I don't think it does. AWS has this feature under RDS Proxy, but it's an extra service and comes with extra cost (and a bit cumbersome to use in my opinion, it should have been designed as a checkbox, not an entire separate thing to maintain).

Although, it technically has "load balancer", in form of a DNS entry that resolves to a random reader replica, if I recall correctly.

I think a big piece missing from these conversations is compliance frameworks and customer trust. Of your selling to enterprise customers or governments, they want to go through your stack, networking, security, audit logs, and access controls with a fine toothed comb.

Everything you do that isn't "normal" is another conversation you need to have with an auditor plus each customer. Those eat up a bunch of time and deals take longer to close.

Right or wrong, these decisions make you less "serious" and therefore less credible in the eyes of many enterprise customers. You can get around that perception, but it takes work. Not hosting on one of the big 3 needs to be decided with that cost in mind

I've had to set up postgres manually ( before docker TBF) and it's best described as suffering.

Things will go wrong. And it's all your fault. You can't just blame AWS.

Also are we changing the definition of self hosting. Self hosting on Digital Ocean ?!

Great read. I moved my video sharing app from GCP to self hosted on a beefy home server+ cloudflare for object storage and video streaming. Had been using Cloud SQL as my managed db and now running Postgres on my own dedicated hardware. I was forced to move away from the cloud primarily because of the high cost of running video processing(not because Cloud SQL was bad) but instead have discovered self hosting the db isnt as difficult as its made out to be. And there was a daily charge of keeping the DB hot which I dont have now. Will be moving to a rackmount server at a datacolo in about a month so this was great to read and confirms my experience.

Enjoyed the article, and the "less can be more than you think" mindset in general.

To the author - on Android Chrome I seem to inevitably load the page scrolled to the bottom, footnotes area. Scrolling up, back button, click link again has the same results - I start out seeing footnotes. Might be worth a look.

> Self-hosting a database sounds terrifying.

Is this actually the "common" view (in this context)?

I've got decades with databases so I cannot even begin to fathom where such an attitude would develop, but, is it?

Boggling.

Over a decade of cloud provider propaganda achieves that. We appear to have lost the basic skill of operating a *nix machine, so anything even remotely close to that now sounds terrifying.

You mean you need to SSH into the box? Horrifying!

I wish this article would have went more in-depth on how they're setting up backups. The great thing about sequel light is lightstream makes backup and restore something you don't really have to think about

ZFS snapshot, send, receive, clone, spin up another postgresql server on the backup server, take full backup on that clone once per week

for postgres specifically pgbackrest works well. Using in a home doing backups to r2 and local s3.

Self-hosting is one of those things that makes sense when you can control all of the variables. For example, can you stop the developers from using obscure features of the db, that suddenly become deprecated, causing you to need to do a manual rolling back while they fix the code? A one-button UI to do that might be very handy. Can you stop your IT department from breaking the VPN, preventing you from logging into the db box at exactly the wrong time? Having it all in a UI that routes around IT's fat fingers might be helpful.

> If your database goes down at 3 AM, you need to fix it.

Of all the places I've worked that had the attitude "If this goes down at 3AM, we need to fix it immediately", there was only one where that was actually justifiable from a business perspective. I'm worked at plenty of places that had this attitude despite the fact that overnight traffic was minimal and nothing bad actually happened if a few clients had to wait until business hours for a fix.

I wonder if some of the preference for big-name cloud infrastructure comes from the fact that during an outage, employees can just say "AWS (or whatever) is having an outage, there's nothing we can do" vs. being expected to actually fix it

From this perspective, the ability to fix problems more quickly when self hosting could be considered an antifeature from the perspective of the employee getting woken up at 3am

This is also the basis for most SaaS purchases by large corporations. The old "Nobody gets fired for choosing IBM."

The worst SEV calls are the one where you twiddle your thumbs waiting for a support rep to drop a crumb of information about the provider outage.

You wake up. It's not your fault. You're helpless to solve it.

Not when that provider is AWS and the outage is hitting news websites. You share the link to AWS being down and go back to sleep.

No. You sit on the call and wait to restore your service to your users. There’s bullshit toil in disabling scale in as the outage gets longer.

Eventually, AWS has a VP of something dial in to your call to apologize. They’re unprepared and offer no new information. The get handed to a side call for executive bullshit.

AWS comes back. Your support rep only vaguely knows what’s going on. Your system serves some errors but digs out.

Then you go to sleep.

Really? That might be an anecdote sampled from unusually small businesses, then. Between myself and most peers I’ve ever talked to about availability, I heard an overwhelming majority of folks describe systems that really did need to be up 24/7 with high availability, and thus needed fast 24/7 incident response.

That includes big and small businesses, SaaS and non-SaaS, high scale (5M+rps) to tiny scale (100s-10krps), and all sorts of different markets and user bases. Even at the companies that were not staffed or providing a user service over night, overnight outages were immediately noticed because on average, more than one external integration/backfill/migration job was running at any time. Sure, “overnight on call” at small places like that was more “reports are hardcoded to email Bob if they hit an exception, and integration customers either know Bob’s phone number or how to ask their operations contact to call Bob”, but those are still environments where off-hours uptime and fast resolution of incidents was expected.

Between me, my colleagues, and friends/peers whose stories I know, that’s an N of high dozens to low hundreds.

What am I missing?

> What am I missing?

IME the need for 24x7 for B2B apps is largely driven by global customer scope. If you have customers in North American and Asia, now you need 24x7 (and x365 because of little holiday overlap).

That being said, there are a number of B2B apps/industries where global scope is not a thing. For example, many providers who operate in the $4.9 trillion US healthcare market do not have any international users. Similarly the $1.5 trillion (revenue) US real estate market. There are states where one could operate where healthcare spending is over $100B annually. Banks. Securities markets. Lots of things do not have 24x7 business requirements.

I’ve worked for banks, multiple large and small US healthcare-related companies, and businesses that didn’t use their software when they were closed for the night.

All of those places needed their backend systems to be up 24/7. The banks ran reports and cleared funds with nightly batches—hundreds of jobs a night for even small banking networks. The healthcare companies needed to receive claims and process patient updates (e.g. your provider’s EMR is updated if you die or have an emergency visit with another provider you authorized for records sharing—and no, this is not handled by SaaS EMRs in many cases) over night so that their systems were up to date when they next opened for business. The “regular” businesses closed for the night generated reports and frequently had IT staff doing migrations, or senior staff working on something at midnight due the next day (when the head of marketing is burning the midnight oil on that presentation, you don’t want to be the person explaining that she can’t do it because the file server hosting the assets is down all the time after hours).

And again, that’s the norm I’ve heard described from nearly everyone in software/IT that I know: most businesses expect (and are willing to pay for or at least insist on) 24/7 uptime for their computer systems. That seems true across the board: for big/small/open/closed-off-hours/international/single-timezone businesses alike.

You are right that a lot of systems at a lot of places need 24x7. Obviously.

But there are also a not-insignificant number of important systems where nobody is on a pager, where there is no call rotation[1]. Computers are much more reliable than they were even 20 years ago. It is an Acceptable Business Choice to not have 24x7 monitoring for some subset of systems.

Until very recently[2], Citibank took their public website/user portal offline for hours a week.

1 - if a system does not have a fully staffed call rotation with escalations, it's not prepared for a real off-hours uptime challenge 2 - they may still do this, but I don't have a way to verify right now.

Uptime is also a sales and marketing point, regardless of real-world usage. Business folks in service-providing companies will usually expect high availability by default, only tempered by the cost and reality of more nines.

Also, in addition to perception/reputation issues, B2B contracts typically include an SLA, and nobody wants to be in breach of contract.

I think the parent you're replying to is wrong, because I've worked at small companies selling into large enterprise, and the expectation is basically 24/7 service availability, regardless of industry.

For a fascinating counterpoint (gist: cloud hosted Postgres on RDS aurora is not anything like the system you would host yourself, and other cloud deployments of databases should also not be done like our field is used to doing it when self-hosting) see this other front page article and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334990

Aurora is a closed-source fork of PostgreSQL. So it is indeed not possible to self-host it.

However a self-hosted PostgreSQL on a bare metal server with NVMe SSDs will much faster than what RDS is capable of. Especially at the same price points.

Yep! I was mostly replying to TFA’s claim that AWS RDS is

> Standard Postgres compiled with some AWS-specific monitoring hooks

… and other operational tools deployed alongside it. That’s not always true: RDS classic may be those things, but RDS Aurora/Serverless is anything but.

As to whether

> self-hosted PostgreSQL on a bare metal server with NVMe SSDs will much faster than what RDS is capable of

That’s often but not always true. Plenty of workloads will perform better on RDS (read auto scaling is huge in Serverless: you can have new read replica nodes auto-launch in response to e.g. a wave of concurrent, massive reporting queries; many queries can benefit from RDS’s additions to/modifications of the pg buffer cache system that work with the underlying storage)—and that’s even with the VM tax and the networked-storage tax! Of course, it’ll cost more in real money whether or not it performs better, further complicating the cost/benefit analysis here.

Also, pedantically, you can run RDS on bare metal with local NVMEs.

> Also, pedantically, you can run RDS on bare metal with local NVMEs.

Only if you like your data to evaporate when the server stops.

I'm relatively sure that the processing power and memory you can buy on OVH / Hetzner / co. is larger and cheaper even if you take into account peaks in your usage patterns.

> Only if you like your data to evaporate when the server stops.

(Edited to remove glib and vague rejoinder, sorry) Then hibernate/reboot it instead of stopping it? Alternatively, that’s what backup-to S3, periodic snapshot-to-EBS, clustering, or running an EBS-persisted zero-query-volume tiny replica are for.

> the processing power and memory you can buy on OVH / Hetzner / co. is larger and cheaper

Cheaper? Yeah, generally. But larger/more performant? Not always—it’s not about peaks/autoscaling, it’s about the (large) minority of workloads that will work better on RDS/Aurora/Serverless: auto-scale-out makes the reports run on time regardless of cost; bulk data loads are available on replicas a lot sooner on Aurora because the storage is the replication system, not the WAL; and so on—if you add up all the situations where the hosted RDBMS systems trump self hosted, you get an amount that’s not “hosted is always better/worth it”, but it’s not “hosted is just ops time savings and is otherwise just slower/more expensive” either. And that’s before you add reliability into the conversation.

I recently was also doing some research into what projects exist that come close to a “managed Postgres on Digital Ocean” experience, sadly there’s some building blocks but nothing that really makes it a complete no-brainer.

https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/what-i-wish-existed-for-se...

Just don't try to build it from source haha. Compiling Postgres 18 with the PostGIS extension has been such a PITA because the topology component won't configure to not use the system /usr/bin/postgres and has given me a lot of grief. Finally got it fixed I think though.

I actually always build PostgreSQL from source as I want 32kb block size as default. It makes ZFS compression more awesome.

Disk read write performance is also orders of magnitude better/cheaper/faster.

Without disagreeing:

Sometimes it is nice to simplify the conversation with non-tech management. Oh, you want HA / DR / etc? We click a button and you get it (multi-AZ). Clicking the button doubles your DB costs from x to y. Please choose.

Then you have one less repeating conversation and someone to blame.

People really love jumping through hoops to avoid spending five dollars.

Pros self-host their DB's

I didnt even know there were companies that would host postgres for you. I self host it for my personal projects with 0 users and it works just fine, so I don't know why anyone would do it any differently.

I can't tell if this is satire or not with the first sentence and the "0 users" parts of your comment, but I know several solo devs with millions of users who self host their database and apps as well.

I moved from AWS RDS to ScaleWay RDS, had the same effect on cost

Without stating actual numbers if not comfortable, what was the % savings one over the other? Happy with performance? Looking at potential of doing the same move.

Better yet, self host Postgres on your own open source PaaS with Coolify, Dokploy, or Canine, and then you can also self host all your apps on your VPS too. I use Dokploy but I'm looking into Canine, and I know many have used Coolify with great success.

Now for the next step... just use SQLite (it's possible it will be enough for your case).

Disclaimer: there's no silver bullet, yadda yadda. But SQLite in WAL mode and backups using Litestream have worked perfectly for me.

Everyone and their mother wants to host Postgres for you!

Huh? Maybe I missed something, but...why should self-hosting a database server be hard or scary? Sure, you are then responsible for security backups, etc...but that's not really different in the cloud - if anything, the cloud makes it more complicated.

Well for the clickops folks who've built careers on the idea that 'systems administration is dead'... I imagine having to open a shell and install some stuff or modify a configuration file is quite scary.

Self-hosting a database server is not particularly hard or scary for an engineer.

Hiring and replacing engineers who can and want to manage database servers can be hard or scary for employers.

> Hiring and replacing engineers who can and want to manage database servers can be hard or scary for employers.

I heard there's this magical thing called "money" that is claimed to help with this problem. You offer even half of the AWS markup to your employees and suddenly they like managing database servers. Magic I tell you!

I'd say a managed dB, at minimum, should be handling upgrades and backups for you. If it doesn't, thats not a managed db, thats a self-service db. You're paying a premium to do the work yourself.

> When self-hosting makes sense: 1. If you're just starting out in software & want to get something working quickly [...]

This is when you use SQLite, not Postgres. Easy enough to turn into Postgres later, nothing to set up. It already works. And backups are literally just "it's a file, incremental backup by your daily backups already covers this".

I was on a severely restricted budget and self hosted everything for 15+ years, while the heavily used part of the database was on a RAM card. The RAM drive was soft raided to a hard drive pair which were 3Ware raid1 hdds, just in case, and also did a daily backup on the database and during that time never had any data loss and never had to restore anything from backup. And my options were severely restricted due to a capped income.

The real downside wasn't technical. The constant background anxiety you had to learn to live with, since the hosted news sites were hammered by the users. The dreaded SMS alerts saying the server was inaccessible (often due to ISP issues) or going abroad meant persuading one of your mates to keep an eye on things just in case, created a lot of unnecessary stress.

AWS is quite good. It has everything you need and removes most of that operational burden, so the angst is much lower, but the pricing is problematic.

And then there is the urge to Postgres everything.

I was disappointed alloy doesn't support timescaledb as a metrics endpoint. Considering switching to telegraf just because I can store the metrics on Postgres.

I've always just Postgressed everything. I used MySQL a bit in the PHP3 days, but eventually moved onto Postgres.

SQLite when prototyping, Postgres for production.

If you need to power a lawnmower and all you have is a 500bhp Scania V8, you may as well just do it.

It's pretty easy these days to spin up a local Postgres container. Might as well use it for prototyping too, and save yourself the hassle of switching later.

It might seem minor, but the little things add up. Make your dev environment mirror prod from the start will save you a bunch of headaches. Then, when you're ready to deploy, there is nothing to change.

Even better, stage to a production-like environment early, and then deploy day can be as simple as a DNS record change.

Thanks to LetsEncrypt DNS-01, you can absolutely spin up a production-like environment with SSL and everything. It's definitely worth doing.

Have you given thought to why you prototype with SQLite?

I have switched to using postgres even for prototyping once I prepared some shell scripts for various setup. With hibernate (java) or knex (Javascript/NodeJS) and with unit tests (Test Driven Development approach) for code, I feel I have reduced the friction of using postgres from the beginning.

Because when I get tired of reconstructing the contents of the database between my various dev machines (at home, at work, on a remote server, on my laptop) I can just scp the sqlite db across.

Because it's "low effort" to just fire it into sqlite and if I have to do ridiculous things to the schema as I footer around working out exactly what I want the database to do.

I don't want to use nodejs if I can possibly avoid it and you literally could not pay me to even look at Java, there isn't enough money in the world.

I mentioned Hibernate and knex as examples of DB schema version control tools.

Incidentally, you can rsync postgres dumps as well. That's what I do when testing and when sharing test data with team mates. At times, I decide to pgload the database dump into a different target system.

My reason for sharing: I accepted that I was being lethargic about using postgres, so I just automated certain things as I went along.

I have now switched to pglite for prototyping, because it lets me use all the postgres features.

Oho, what is this pglite that I have never heard of? I already like the sound of it.

`pglite` is a WASM version of postgres. I use it in one of my side projects for providing a postgres DB running in the user's browser.

For most purposes, it works perfectly fine, but with two main caveats:

1. It is single user, single connection (i.e. no MVCC) 2. It doesn't support all postgres extensions (particularly postGIS), though it does support pgvector

https://github.com/supabase-community/pg-gateway is something that may be used to use pglite for prototyping I guess, but I haven't used this.

(This is very reductionist)

A lot of this comes down to devs not understanding infrastructure and infrastructure components and the insane interplay and complexity. And they don't care! Apps, apps apps, developers, developers, developers!

On the managerial side, it's often about deflection of responsibility for the Big Boss.

It's not part of the app itself it can be HARD, and if you're not familiar with things, then it's also scary! What if you mess up?

(Most apps don't need the elasticity, or the bells and whistles, but you're paying for them even if you don't use them, indirectly.)

I wish this post went into the actual how! He glossed over the details. There is a link to his repo, which is a start I suppose: https://github.com/piercefreeman/autopg

A blog post that went into the details would be awesome. I know Postgres has some docs for this (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/backup.html), but it's too theoretical. I want to see a one-stop-shop with everything you'd reasonably need to know to self host: like monitoring uptime, backups, stuff like that.

I've operated both self-hosted and managed database clusters with complex topologies and mission-critical data at well-known tech companies.

Managed database services mostly automate a subset of routine operational work, things like backups, some configuration management, and software upgrades. But they don't remove the need for real database operations. You still have to validate restores, build and rehearse a disaster recovery plan, design and review schemas, review and optimize queries, tune indexes, and fine-tune configuration, among other essentials.

In one incident, AWS support couldn't determine what was wrong with an RDS cluster and advised us to "try restarting it".

Bottom line: even with managed databases, you still need people on the team who are strong in DBOps. You need standard operating procedures and automation, built by your team. Without that expertise, you're taking on serious risk, including potentially catastrophic failure modes.

I've had an RDS instance run out of disk space and then get stuck in "modifying" for 24 hours (until an AWS operator manually SSH'd in I guess). We had to restore from the latest snapshot and manually rebuild the missing data from logs/other artifacts in the meantime to restore service.

I would've very much preferred being able to SSH in myself and fix it on the spot. Ironically the only reason it ran out of space in the first place is that the AWS markup on that is so huge we were operating with little margin for error; none of that would happen with a bare-metal host where I can rent 1TB of NVME for a mere 20 bucks a month.

As far as I know we never got any kind of compensation for this, so RDS ended up being a net negative for this company, tens of thousands spent over a few years for laptop-grade performance and it couldn't even do its promised job the only time it was needed.

Another thread where I can't determine whether the "it's easy" suggestions are from people who are clueless or expert.

Ironically you need a bit of both. You need to be expert enough to make it work, but not "too" expert to be stuck in your ways and/or influenced by all the fear-mongering.

An expert will give you thousands of theoretical reasons why self-hosting the DB is a bad idea.

An "expert" will host it, enjoy the cost savings and deal with the once-a-year occurrence of the theoretical risk (if it ever occurs).

[dead]

honestly at this point I'm actually surprised that there aren't specialized linux distributions for hosting postgres. There's so many kernel-level and file-system level optimizations that can be done that significantly impact performance, and the ability to pare down all of the unneeded stuff in most distributions would make for a pretty compact and highly optimized image.

Recommends hosting postgres yourself. Doesn't recommend a distribution stack. If you try this at a startup to save $50 a month, you will never recoup the time you wasted setting it up. We pay dedicated managed services for these things so we can make products on top of them.

There's not much to recommend; just use the Postgres from your distribution's LTS repo. I like Debian for its rock solid stability.

The one problem with using your distro's Postgres is that your upgrade routine will be dictated by a 3rd party.

And Postgres upgrades are not transparent. So you'll have a 1 or 2 hours task, every 6 to 18 months that you have only a small amount of control over when it happens. This is ok for a lot of people, and completely unthinkable for some other people.

"just use postgres from your distro" is *wildly* underselling the amount of work that it takes to go from apt install postgres to having a production ready setup (backups, replica, pooling, etc). Granted, if it's a tiny database just pg-dumping might be enough, but for many that isn't going to be enough.

I don't think any of these would take more than a week to setup. Assuming you create a nice runbook with every step it would not be horrible to maintain as well. Barman for backups and unless you need multi-master you can use the builtin publication and subscription. Though with scale things can complicated really fast but most of the time you won't that much traffic to have something complicated.

Patroni, Pigsty, Crunchy, CloudNativePG, Zalando, ...

Maybe come back when your database spend is two or three orders of magnitude higher? It gets expensive pretty fast in my experience.