alt Hacker NewsAurora 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.
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.