On Wed, Jun 9, 2021 at 6:50 PM Dean Gibson (DB Administrator) <postgresql@mailpen.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.
