I currently manage, or am "lead dev", for around a half dozen to 10 apps using Postgres as the database. For two of those I use a managed database service (AWS RDS / AWS Aurora Postgres) because they drive mission critical high value products / services and I wouldn't consider using a standalone install of Postgres. For other apps that are not so mission critical I am perfectly happy saving considerable money and running them on a VPS on AWS EC2 or Digital Ocean or Linode. So ultimately it depends on the app and the risk tolerance for Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective.
That's super interesting! Have heard people do the opposite for performance reasons (run on bare EC2) and storage cost reason. Do you notice a big performance difference between the EC2 apps and RDS apps? Also have you had any EBS volume related issues on RDS or unexplained latency/downtime ?
I originally wanted to use DMS but our DB failed the pre-migration assessment so that forced us to Logical Replication.
We also worked with Jesse. You are right he is amazingly helpful. Unfortunately we got some pretty questionable help from others before he was assigned to our support ticket but once that happened it was infinitely improved.
Ahhhh... well you might've dodged a bullet to be honest! If I were to do it all again, there's a good chance I might stick with the standard tools rather than DMS.
Thanks for the in depth article by the way, very well written!
Keep an eye on your AuroraStorageIO costs going forward, as we said, we halved our costs and increased performance by switching back to RDS and increasing the PIOPs available. I'm sure that'll be workload sensitive though, so YMMV. We did a bunch of benchmarking, and aurora seemed nice apart from this.
We must've lucked out, as we got Jesse at the start.
