Re: large database

On Dec 11, 2012, at 2:25 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 7:26 AM, Mihai Popa <mihai(at)lattica(dot)com> wrote:
>> Second, where should I deploy it? The cloud or a dedicated box?
>
> Forget cloud. For similar money, you can get dedicated hosting with
> much more reliable performance. We've been looking at places to deploy
> a new service, and to that end, we booked a few cloud instances and
> started playing. Bang for buck, even the lower-end dedicated servers
> (eg about $35/month) majorly outdo Amazon cloud instances.

So, speaking as somebody that's spent the last several months dealing with postgres scaling in the Amazon cloud, I don't think it's so clear cut.

Yes, AWS instances are way more expensive compared to what you can buy in physical hardware. (Paying for a reserved instance drops that cost a lot, but even then you're still paying a hefty premium.) And yes, the biggest AWS instance you can get today is mediocre at best compared to real DB hardware. Yes, smaller instances sizes are crammed together and can suffer from noisy neighbors. (This isn't a problem with larger instances - which of course cost more.) And while you still have to worry about hardware failures, natural disasters, and other forms of calamities... at least with AWS solving those problems is easy and as simple as throwing more money at the problem. When you're relatively small, getting your severs cololocated in nearby-but-seperate datacenters is a hassle, and having enough hardware on hand to manage failures is annoying. Dealing with networking between your data centers is annoying.

So does AWS cost a lot more and give you a lower ceiling? No doubt. But it arguably also gives you a much more stable floor to stand on, and it has a lot of other benefits that don't apply to dbs.