Re: AWS forcing PG upgrade from v9.6 a disaster

On Wed, Jun 9, 2021 at 6:50 PM Dean Gibson (DB Administrator) <
postgresql(at)mailpen(dot)com> wrote:

> Having now successfully migrated from PostgreSQL v9.6 to v13.2 in Amazon
> RDS, I wondered, why I am paying AWS for an RDS-based version, when I was
> forced by their POLICY to go through the effort I did? I'm not one of the
> crowd who thinks, "It works OK, so I don't update anything". I'm usually
> one who is VERY quick to apply upgrades, especially when there is a
> fallback ability. However, the initial failure to successfully upgrade
> from v9.6 to any more recent major version, put me in a time-limited box
> that I really don't like to be in.
>

Right, and had you deployed on EC2 you would not have been forced to
upgrade. This is an argument against RDS for this particular problem.

>
> If I'm going to have to deal with maintenance issues, like I easily did
> when I ran native PostgreSQL, why not go back to that? So, I've ported my
> database back to native PostgreSQL v13.3 on an AWS EC2 instance. It looks
> like I will save about 40% of the cost, which is in accord with this
> article: https://www.iobasis.com/Strategies-to-reduce-Amazon-RDS-Costs/
>

That is correct, it is quite a bit less expensive to host your own EC2
instances. Where it is not cheaper is when you need to easily configure
backups, take a snapshot, or bring up a replica. For those in the know,
putting in some work upfront largely removes the burden that RDS corrects
but a lot of people who deploy RDS are *not* DBAs, or even Systems people.
They are front end developers.

Glad to see you were able to work things out.

JD

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