[HN Gopher] We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds ...
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       We migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime
        
       Author : sh_tomer
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2024-01-18 21:51 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (gds.blog.gov.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (gds.blog.gov.uk)
        
       | Edwinr95 wrote:
       | I'm quite negatively surprised that a government service is
       | moving from their own platform to AWS for such an important
       | service.
        
         | cpursley wrote:
         | And an American one, at that (we're talking government services
         | here, not some SaaS). Are there really no native UK cloud
         | providers?
        
           | cameronh90 wrote:
           | Not any remotely comparable. The small "cloud" providers we
           | do have were just reselling vSphere last time I looked into
           | it.
        
         | jazzyjackson wrote:
         | I don't know what it's like in UK but it may be the case that
         | government has a hard time a{ttract,fford}ing talent to
         | administer everything in house. Not that AWS is great for cost
         | saving but if its between paying 50k/year for cloud services
         | and not being able to find an engineer who will competently do
         | the job for less than 50k, then the cloud is your only move
         | really.
        
         | ris wrote:
         | GOV.UK PaaS also runs on AWS (for as long as it remains to
         | exist)
        
         | okasaki wrote:
         | All UK businesses run on Oracle and Microsoft, so I'm not sure
         | why you're surprised. They have us by the balls.
        
         | kingkongjaffa wrote:
         | > This is an AWS RDS PostgreSQL database and it lives in the
         | PaaS' AWS account. Our apps that run in the PaaS talk to this
         | database. We are going to call this database our 'source
         | database'.
         | 
         | It already was. Read the article.
        
         | conception wrote:
         | AWS has a lot of pre-audited compliance built into their
         | services. Being able to inherit their certification for
         | services can save an organization a lot of time and effort.
        
           | lnxg33k1 wrote:
           | Its not an organisation, its a blucking government, it
           | handles citizen data, and its sending them to a company of
           | foreign country, because it can't hire some system
           | administrators? A GOVERNMENT? What are they doing? Still
           | looking for their product market fit and can't afford the
           | headcount? Is it a joke?
        
         | otteromkram wrote:
         | I'd argue that AWS is much better suited than self-hosting
         | _because_ it 's such an important service.
         | 
         | Downtime becomes negligible and global reach vastly increases
         | with comparably little cost.
        
         | 0xbadcafebee wrote:
         | [delayed]
        
       | mbb70 wrote:
       | Interesting to compare this to https://knock.app/blog/zero-
       | downtime-postgres-upgrades discussed here
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616181
       | 
       | A lot of the discussion boiled down to 'this is a lot of
       | complexity to avoid a few minutes of downtime'. I guess this is
       | the proof, just use AWS Data Migration Service, swap the DNS
       | entries to go live and live with 11 seconds of downtime.
        
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       (page generated 2024-01-18 23:00 UTC)