[HN Gopher] Heroku Postgres is now based on AWS Aurora
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Heroku Postgres is now based on AWS Aurora
Author : mebcitto
Score : 73 points
Date : 2024-05-31 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.heroku.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.heroku.com)
| metadat wrote:
| Product Storage Max Connection Monthly Pricing
| Essential-0 1 GB 20 $5 Essential-1 10 GB
| 20 $9 Essential-2 32 GB 40
| $20
|
| The pricing looks quite competitive, although I'm not sure what
| the prior rates were.
|
| 10 years ago I spent 10x+ per month for 32GB (RAM) Heroku
| Postgres instances, IIRC they were around $400/mo, maybe even
| more.
| fweimer wrote:
| That's 750$/month now, I think:
| https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql#pricing
| (Standard 4)
| SahAssar wrote:
| > 10 years ago I spent 10x+ per month for 32GB (RAM) Heroku
| Postgres instances, IIRC they were around $400/mo, maybe even
| more.
|
| Aren't you comparing RAM vs Storage there? The pricing chart
| here says nothing about RAM.
| macNchz wrote:
| These "Essential" tiers are bare bones instances for toys/mvps,
| they're much different than the bigger ones. No replication,
| 99.5% uptime target, no maintenance windows etc.
| koromak wrote:
| Oroboros eating its tail
| muratsu wrote:
| I don't know if it's still the case but a few years ago all major
| cloud providers were easily giving away thousands of dollars in
| cloud credits. I expect them to stop this soon since smaller
| cloud players build on top of them and offer better dx and
| startups prefer to work with these smaller companies despite free
| credits from larger players.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| > startups prefer to work with these smaller companies despite
| free credits from larger players
|
| Says who? My experience is the opposite - tending towards too
| much reliance on the main providers because of the credits
| muratsu wrote:
| Vercel is going strong - 25.5M in 2022, 100M in 2024. Netlify
| is currently at 30M. Add Supabase, Render, Railway, ...
| rgbrenner wrote:
| AWS alone is $100B/yr now
| iancarroll wrote:
| Having previously been on several managed PostgreSQL providers
| and now on AWS Aurora -- Aurora has been pretty great in terms of
| reliability and performance with large row counts and upsert
| performance.
|
| However, Aurora isn't cheap and is at least ~80% of our monthly
| AWS bill. I wonder how it is cheaper than Heroku's previous
| offerings? Is it Aurora Serverless v2 or something like that to
| reduce cost? Aurora billing is largely around IOPS, and Heroku's
| pricing doesn't seem to reflect that.
| encoderer wrote:
| Aurora has a new configuration option that changes billing from
| iops to higher storage costs. Might be what this is using.
| iancarroll wrote:
| Yeah, that's what we use as well but I don't think that
| addresses the underlying instance cost? I'm not familiar with
| Serverless v2 though, if that's what this is using.
| paulddraper wrote:
| The instance cost is not much different then normal heroku
| compute
| drusepth wrote:
| Heroku Postgres has always been priced on platform convenience
| with very high margins. It's been many years now so I don't
| remember the exact numbers, but I moved a few databases from
| Heroku to AWS and reduced my DB costs ~90% (magnitude ~900/mo
| --> ~100/mo) for roughly the same specs. They probably have a
| lot of margins to eat into before they need to adjust prices.
| iancarroll wrote:
| I am not seeing the margins in this $5/mo instance but I
| could be wrong!
| eljimmy wrote:
| We're using the highest tier Postgres instance at my work
| for one of our legacy Heroku apps and it costs thousands
| over what we'd pay for the equivalent on AWS directly.
| jmspring wrote:
| I know Salesforce has a huge AWS presence. That said, is it
| possible they are doing multitenancy? I don't know myself.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Just curious, does Aurora scale down at all in price, i.e. if I
| have a test instance that's hardly ever used, does it ever end
| up being cheaper than a classic RDS instance?
| nilamo wrote:
| It scales to zero, so costs nothing when it's not in use...
| hfern wrote:
| Can you share which configuration scales to $0? I am not
| aware of that being possible. Even the serverless option
| has a base ACU rate.
| bdcravens wrote:
| v1 of Serverless did scale to 0, but that's no longer an
| option
| debuggerpk wrote:
| that has not been my experience.
| bdcravens wrote:
| You're thinking of Aurora Serverless, but the typical
| Aurora customer isn't using the Serverless offering.
| Additionally, the original version of Aurora Serverless
| scaled to 0, but v2 doesn't.
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuid
| e...
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >> Aurora isn't cheap and is at least ~80% of our monthly AWS
| bill.
|
| Why don't you run your own Postgres?
|
| It's not hard - why pay such a premium for the Amazon version?
| szundi wrote:
| Is it less true for other cloud stuff?
| jrockway wrote:
| Aurora has treated us well. We make a self-hosted product that
| requires Postgres; our sales/customer engineering folks just
| started telling people to use Aurora, and it hasn't caused any
| problems despite the fact that all of our tests run against
| stock Postgres. Can't complain. Though a VM with Postgres would
| be plenty for our needs, and cost thousands of dollars less a
| month. But, HA is nice if you want to pay for it.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Genuine question, who even uses Heroku anymore?
|
| A VPS (hetzner, etc) + managed postgres DB (supabase / AWS / etc)
| or a local one might more more than enough these days.
| risyachka wrote:
| probably those who don't want to set uptime alerts, fine-tune
| configs, set up backups and restores (which are essential
| because sooner rather later someone always deletes a few
| rows/tables) and want to focus on business
| Andugal wrote:
| For a lot of use cases, nothing beats << git push >> and tada
| your app is deployed.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Very easy to do with GitHub actions or the equivalent in
| gitlab and probably other competitors by now I imagine.
|
| If you wanted to spend money on something else, circleci and
| others help manage ci/cd as well.
| davepeck wrote:
| I do, as do several startups I advise.
|
| Despite interesting competition, my feeling is that the Heroku
| of 2024 remains... Heroku.
|
| I feel this way even though -- depending on how you segment --
| the list of "interesting" competitors is quite long at this
| point: Render, Railway, Northflank, Fly.io, Vercel, DO App
| Platform, etc.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I revisit heroku alts every ~6months and I am shocked how not
| ergonomic they still are, I switched to DO VPS + Ansible
| Container & Github Actions for any project that doesn't need
| infinite scale after Salesforce paused heroku development but
| I'd go back to literally any heroku clone.
|
| It's crazy how the ergonomic still just aren't there.
| davepeck wrote:
| Yes, completely agree; I'm equally surprised by the poor
| DXes.
|
| (And: bugs. I'm also surprised by the kinds of issues I run
| into on some of those sites in my list -- problems that,
| even if not show-stopping, feel like revealing indicators
| of quality.)
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > Yes, completely agree; I'm equally surprised by the
| poor DXes.
|
| Any specifics/examples? I find it hard to imagine those
| "big name" companies/platforms you just mentioned don't
| have entire teams dedicated to hyper-optimizing
| experience.
| strix_varius wrote:
| IME the Heroku of 2024 is Render.
| swader999 wrote:
| It's really easy to be SOC2 compliant for a small SaaS on
| heroku. We need to grow in customers and Dev resources to pull
| it off on Raw AWS. Am looking for options though because heroku
| is increasing their prices.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I use render.com. Heroku is stuck in the past.
| karmelapple wrote:
| We do, although we're in the middle of moving our entire Heroku
| Postgres spend over to Crunchy Data [1].
|
| We were getting close to one of the big jumps on the standard
| pricing of Heroku Postgres, and we would have had to basically
| double our monthly cost to lift the max data we could store
| from 1.5TB to 2.0TB. On Crunchy Data, that additional disk
| space will be like 1% more rather than 100% more.
|
| While investigating Crunchy, I ran some benchmarks, and I found
| Crunchy Bridge Postgres to be running 3X faster than Heroku
| Postgres.
|
| Heroku seems to be working on some interesting new things, but
| I feel burned by the subpar performance and lack of basically
| any new features over many years. I don't know if the new
| Aurora-based database will be faster than Crunchy, but the
| benchmarks they're talking about sound like they're finally
| about to catch them. But we also have better features on
| Crunchy, too, such as logical replication. Logical replication
| is still not available on Heroku.
|
| The experience for deploying apps and having add-ons is still
| pretty easy, but we'll see how that improves. HTTP2 support is
| still in beta.
|
| 1. https://www.crunchydata.com
| singingfish wrote:
| +1 - recommend crunchy. I ran a substantial oracle to
| postgres project recently and crunchy were great.
| cyberax wrote:
| I'm working in a new startup, and I tried several "easy"
| solutions: AWS Lightsail, Heroku, Crunchy.
|
| I settled up on AWS ECS :)
|
| My main issue with Heroku was that they have not changed
| anything in _years_. No support for gRPC, no IPv6, and simple
| VPC peering costs $1200 a month.
| davepeck wrote:
| Yeah, the lack of HTTP/2 support has been a long-standing
| issue with Heroku.
|
| They _just_ shipped HTTP /2 terminated at their router [0],
| and have it on their roadmap [1] to support HTTP/2 all the
| way through. But it seems like it's at minimum a few months
| off.
|
| (As for VPC peering: the moment you need that, it sorta
| feels like Heroku is no longer the right place to be, even
| ignoring the costs.)
|
| [0] https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-http2-public-beta [1]
| https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130
| cakoose wrote:
| A few years ago I was considering Heroku for something new. But
| then I learned that Heroku Postgres's HA offering used async
| replication, meaning you could lose minutes of writes in the
| event that the primary instance failed. That was a dealbreaker.
|
| That was very surprising to me. Most businesses that are
| willing to pay 2x for an HA database are probably NOT likely to
| be ok with that kind of data loss risk.
|
| (AWS and GCP's HA database offerings use synchronous
| replication.)
| drewda wrote:
| I'm surprised to read this, given that both Heroku and Salesforce
| more broadly have hired what felt like a good number of
| PostgreSQL committers.
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