Having lived in both worlds, there are services wherein, yeah, host it yourself. But having done DB on-prem/on-metal, dedicated hosting, and cloud, databases are the one thing I'm happy to overpay for.

The things you describe involve a small learning curve, each different for each cloud environment, but then you never have to think about it again. You don't have to worry about downtime (if you set it up right), running a bash script ... literally nothing else has to be done.

Am I overpaying for Postgres compared to the alternatives? Hell yeah. Has it paid off? 100%, would never want to go back.

> Do i search for Postgres?

Yes. In your AWS console right after logging in. And pretty much all of your other setup and config questions are answered by just filling out the web form right there. No sshing to change the parameters they are all available right there.

> And what happens if it uses too much resources?

It can't. You've chosen how much resources (CPU/Memory/Disk) to give it. Run away cloud costs are bill by usage stuff like redshift, s3, lambda, etc.

I'm a strong advocate for self (for some value of self) hosting over cloud, but your making cloud out to be far more difficult than it is.

Actually... for Postgres specifically, it's less than 5 minutes to do so in AWS and you get replication, disaster recovery and basic monitoring all included.

I hated having to deal with PostgreSQL on bare metal.

To answer your questions should someone ask these as well and wish answers:

> Does the IP of my cluster change? If so how to make it static?

Use the DNS entry that AWS gives you as the "endpoint", done. I think you can pin a stable Elastic IP to RDS as well if you wish to expose your RDS DB to the Internet although I have really no idea why one would want that given potential security issues.

> Also can non-aws servers connect to it? No?

You can expose it to the Internet in the creation web UI. I think the default the assistant uses is to open it to 0.0.0.0/0 but the last time I did that is many years past so I hope that AWS asks you about what you want these days.

>Then how to open up the firewall and allow it?

If the above does not, create a Security Group, assign the RDS server to that Security Group and create an Ingress rule that either only allows specific CIDRs or a blanket 0.0.0.0/0.

> And what happens if it uses too much resources? Does it shutdown by itself?

It just gets dog slow if your I/O quota is exhausted, it goes into an error state when the disk goes full. Expand your disk quota and the RDS database becomes accessible again.

> What if i wanna fine tune a config parameter? Do I ssh into it? Can i edit it in the UI?

No SSH at all, not even for manually unfucking something, for that you need the assistance of the AWS support - but in about six years I never had a database FUBAR'ing itself.

As for config parameters, there's an UI for this called "parameter/option groups", you can set almost all config parameters there, and you can use these as templates for other servers you need as well.

This smells like “Dropbox is just rsync”. No skin in the game I think there are pros and cons to each but a Postgres cluster can be as easy as a couple clicks or an entry into a provisioning script. I don’t believe you would be able to architect the same setup with a simple single server ssh and a simple bash script. Unless you already wrote a bash script that magically provisions the cluster across various machines.

> As a self hosting fan, i cant even fathom how hard it would be to even get started running a Postgres or redis cluster on AWS. Like, where do I go? Do i search for Postgres? If so where?

Anything you don't know how to do - or haven't even searched for - either sounds incredibly complex, or incredibly simple.

It is not as simple as you describe to set up HA multi-region Postgres

If you don't care about HA, then sure everything becomes easy! Until you have a disaster to recover and realize that maybe you do care about HA. Or until you have an enterprise customer or compliance requirement that needs to understand your DR and continuity plans.

Yugabyte is the closest I’ve seen to achieving that simplicity with self host multi region and HA Postgres and it is still quite a bit more involved than the steps you describe and definitely more work than paying for their AWS service. (I just mention instead of Aurora because there’s no self host process to compare directly there as it’s proprietary.)

Did you try ChatGPT for step by step directions for an EC2 deployed database? It would be a great litmus test to see if it does proper security and lockdown in the process, and what options it suggests aside from the AWS-managed stuff.

It would be so useful to have an EC2/S3/etc compatible API that maps to a homelab. Again something that Claude should allegedly be able to vibecode give then breadth of documentation, examples, and discussions on the AWS API.

Your comment seems much more in the vain "I already learned how to do it this way, and I would have to learn something to do it the other way"

Which is of course true, but it is true for all things. Provisioning a cluster in AWS takes a bit of research and learning, but so did learning how to set it up locally. I think most people who know how to do both will agree it is simpler to learn how to use the AWS version than learning how to self host it.

A fun one in the cloud is "when I upgrade to a new version of Postgres, how long is the downtime and what happens to my indexes?"

For AWS RDS, no big deal. Bare metal or Docker? Oh now THAT is a world of pain.

Seriously I despise PostgreSQL in particular in how fucking annoying it is to upgrade.

Yep. I know folks running their own clusters on AWS EC2 instead of RDS. They're still on 3 or 4 versions back because upgrading Postgres is a PITA.

If you can self host postgres, you'll find "managing" RDS to be a walk in the park.