
Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility - jeffbarr
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-amazon-aurora-with-postgresql-compatibility/
======
nmilford
I ran the preview for ~2 months on a few instances. No compatibility issues,
but we had queries that were significantly slower than on a vanilla Postgres
instance and a problem with temp table bloat that never got reclaimed (480G as
per \l+, being shown as 1050G billable in the AWS console). The preview
product team never got back to us so I'm going to switch back to the regular
RDS this week and hope my bill doesn't get hosed by the unreclaimed bloat.
Gotta go with the devil I know... ʅ(ツ)ʃ

~~~
markporter_aws
I'm sorry the product team never got back to you. We'll get back to the email
you just sent us on the preview thread.

If you have any issues with your bill, let us know and we'll happily look into
it. But I'd rather work with you to figure out what went on and get it fixed
for you!

~~~
nmilford
Sure thing, feel free to reply to my email. \l+ shows 485 GB, and hitting
temp_bytes from pg_stat_database is 0, but billable space is 1050G. I'd like
to promote Aurora to production, but some of my system's 'legacy' queries
which live behind an ORM are grinding against the Aurora instances. I haven't
had need to really investigate/optimize the queries (or even try to pick apart
what the ORM is doing) as the performance on the vanilla Postgres RDS instance
wasn't was great, but wasn't problematic either, even on the db.t2.large's I'd
use in lower environments vs db.r4.large's I'm using with Aurora. It may be
that I am just missing something obvious.

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jakehow
Is this going to support IAM authentication like Aurora for MySQL does?

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/UsingW...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/UsingWithRDS.IAMDBAuth.html)

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dhd415
The article says, "The [new instance class] db.r4.16xlarge will give you
additional write performance." Does anyone know why this is the case? I
thought one of the distinguishing characteristics of Aurora was that the read
and write performance of its proprietary storage layer was independent of both
the instance class of your database server and the size of your database.

~~~
markporter_aws
It is true that Amazon Aurora is not limited by the bandwidth of the storage
system, as it is huge and distributed across hundreds/thousands of nodes
across an entire AWS region. And storage for each database instance is indeed
only limited to 64TB, far above what most people need. But each single
instance can still have limitations, such as CPU horsepower, memory, etc. The
r4.16xl has 25Gbit networking, as opposed to the r4.8xl, which has 10Gbit
network. So if your workload is write-intensive, such as streaming or IOT
data, you will find the r4.16xl can have significantly better write
performance. [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-
types/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) I hope this helps!

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omarforgotpwd
Wanted to use this, but doesn't support small enough instance types.

~~~
markporter_aws
What instance types would you like to see? T2s? If so, which ones?

~~~
efisher2892
We are also looking to test the small and medium t2s versus PostgresRDS on
small and medium.

~~~
philliphaydon
Where I work we currently run 2 RDS PostgreSQL Instances in production, one on
T2.small and the other T2.medium.

We never run out of CPU credits. We are dying to move to Aurora but the
current instance sizes prevent us :( until we fully move away from SQL Server
where our load on PostgreSQL will increase, its a huge cost for 0 gain right
now.

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hoodoof
Does Amazon contribute cash to the open source projects that it turns into
services?

~~~
markporter_aws
Amazon has made contributions to open source in many ways, including bug
fixes, spending hundreds of thousands/year to sponsor conferences, and even
giving the PostgreSQL community a free testing account to run regression,
soak, or functionality test suites on AWS for free. So yes, Amazon contributes
cash to open source projects, at least to PostgreSQL, which we find to be a
wonderful community that we are proud to be part of.

~~~
hoodoof
How much cash did AWS give to Postgres?

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freedomben
Glad to see this is GA now. The cost benefits and monitoring benefits are huge
for the consumer. So far, I haven't hit any compatibility issues either.

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oh-kumudo
Is this a big deal? What are the noticeable offering here.

~~~
scrollaway
Aurora is very interesting especially in terms of removing storage management
from the equation. I just wish they (and the regular postgres RDS offering)
had support for TimescaleDB
([http://www.timescale.com](http://www.timescale.com)).

~~~
samstave
Mind givin some use case scenarios for timescale that you really like? (aside
from what one may think obvious)

~~~
scrollaway
I want to replace InfluxDB with it. Here's what we gain:

\- Postgres' reliability. Influx is awful and I absolutely do not trust it;
I've had far too much data loss and consistency issues with it.

\- Postgres' internal tooling. Simple things such as "What is my largest
measurement on disk" are not possible in Influx

\- Simplified stack. Timescale makes good on that promise: We no longer would
have to ship influxdb libraries for internal apps. Permissions are simplified
as well.

\- Hosted, managed metrics. Our InfluxDB instance is managed by ourselves and
is a source of issues. Our RDS instance, comparatively, has always purred.

\- More advanced operations, including the full power of Postgres user-defined
functions. Influx doesn't even support dividing one value by another.

\- Grafana support! It's finally here!!! :)

~~~
llsf
I was thinking about the same use-case, but there are features in InfluxDB
(downscaling, retention policies) that are cool when dealing with large amount
of data. If Timescale bridges the gap, I would be happy to give a try...

~~~
akulkarni
(CEO TimescaleDB) We already allow for efficient manual deletion of old
data[1] (2000x faster than PostgreSQL)[2] and rollups via standard PG
aggregates. Automatic retention policies and downsampling are coming soon.

But as one of the commentors above points out, we benefit from the reliability
(and broad ecosystem) of PostgreSQL, which has allowed various companies to
easily deploy us in production with minimal integration efforts.

[1] [http://docs.timescale.com/latest/api/data-
retention](http://docs.timescale.com/latest/api/data-retention)

[2] [https://blog.timescale.com/timescaledb-
vs-6a696248104e](https://blog.timescale.com/timescaledb-vs-6a696248104e)

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khailey
one cool feature is of this release is the Performance Insights dashboard
which makes understanding and analyzing performance much easier
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=4462hcfkApM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=4462hcfkApM)

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vincentdm
Nice. Does anyone know their policy about following major new versions of
Postgres?

I want to launch an app using the new partitioning features of Postgres 10. I
hope Aurora Postgres won't be indefinitely tied to a specific major version,
as is the case with Redshift.

~~~
7rurl
Judging by MySQL Aurora (which is still on MySQL 5.6, when 5.7 released 2
years ago) it will be a while.

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7rurl
Any ETA on making PostreSQL Aurora a HIPAA eligible service? We are currently
using MySQL Aurora and would like to switch to PostreSQL, but we are storing
ePHI, so we can't switch.

~~~
7rurl
According to
[https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/compliance/AWS_HIPAA_Co...](https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/compliance/AWS_HIPAA_Compliance_Whitepaper.pdf)
page 12 the PostreSQL flavor is HIPAA eligible now:

> Customers may use either the MySQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora or
> the PostgreSQL-compatible version as part of our BAA.

But according to [https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services-
re...](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services-reference/)
only the MySQL flavor is:

> Amazon Aurora [MySQL]

I assume the latter simply hasn't been updated yet.

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tengbretson
Really exciting news! Hope to see it added to the BAA quickly.

~~~
richhua
Good news! Aurora PostgreSQL was added to the BAA today (10/26/17). You can
see it on the list of HIPAA-eligible services here:
[https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services-
re...](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services-reference/)

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jsmeaton
Now the wait for our region to gain compatibility.

~~~
jeffbarr
Which one?

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jsmeaton
ap-southeast-2 for us.

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selimnairb
Anyone know if this supports PostGIS extensions?

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aventrix
They state that Aurora "supports the same set of PostgreSQL extensions that
are supported with RDS for PostgreSQL 9.6." Which is a yes. PostGIS version
2.3.2, I believe.

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markporter_aws
@omarforgotpwd, @purphase, @tengbretson: We're working on everything you just
asked for - thanks for letting us know they are important! @jsmeaton: Which
region?

~~~
jskinn
Little old Australia (ap-southeast-2) would be insanely welcome.

