Pickup trucks are great.
No, really. They are great vehicles. You can use them for all sorts of really useful things: Bringing your tools out to a construction gig. Delivering refrigerators. Helping your friend move a sofa. Carting away a reasonable amount of construction debris.
But if you need to deliver 75,000 pounds of steel beams to a construction site, in a single run? A pickup truck will not do it. Not even a big pickup. Not even if you add a new engine. Not even if you are willing to get three pickups. You need equipment designed for that. (And, as a note, the equipment that could handle delivering the steel beams would be a terrible choice for helping a friend move their sofa.)
“But,” I hear you say, “I already know how to drive a pickup! And we have a parking space for it. Can’t we just use the pickup? You’re a truck expert; tell us how to get our pickup to pull that load!”
And I say, “Being a truck expert, I will tell you again, a pickup the wrong kind of truck. There are other trucks that will handle that load with no trouble, but a pickup isn’t one of them. The fact that you have a pickup doesn’t make it the right truck.”
We have many clients that run PostgreSQL, happily, on Amazon Web Services.
Some clients, however, are not happy. They are attempting to haul tractor-trailer loads (such as high volume data warehouses) using pickup trucks (Amazon EC2 instances). They wish us to fix their problem, but are not willing to move off of Amazon in order to get the problem fixed.
I like AWS for a lot of things; it has many virtues, which I will discuss in detail soon. However, AWS is not the right solution for every problem. In particular, if you require a high read or write data rate in order to get the performance you need from your database, you will ultimately not be happy on AWS. AWS has a single block-device storage mechanism, Elastic Block Storage, which simply does not scale up to very high data rates.
That doesn’t mean that AWS is useless, it just means it isn’t the right tool for every job. The problem arises when AWS is considered the fixed point, like the pickup was the fixed point above. At some point, you have to decide:
That being on AWS is so important (for whatever reason) that you are willing to sacrifice the performance you want; or,
The performance you want is so important that you will need to move off of AWS.
Sadly, even the best of consultants do not have the magic engine in our back room that will cause EBS to perform as well as high-speed direct attached storage.
More soon.