Re: Postgresql on EC2/EBS in production?

Nikhil G. Daddikar wrote:
> I was wondering if any of you are using (or tried to use) PG+EC2/EBS
> on a production system. Are any best-practices. Googling didn't help
> much. A few articles I came across scared me a bit.

There have been a couple of reports of happy users:

http://blog.endpoint.com/2010/02/postgresql-ec2-ebs-raid0-snapshot.html
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2009-06/msg00702.php

There are two main things to be wary of:

1) Physical I/O is not very good, thus how that first system used a RAID0.

2) Reliability of EBS is terrible by database standards; I commented on
this a bit already at
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2009-06/msg00762.php The
end result is that you must be careful about how you back your data up,
with a continuous streaming backup via WAL shipping being the
recommended approach. I wouldn't deploy into this environment in a
situation where losing a minute or two of transactions in the case of a
EC2/EBS failure would be unacceptable, because that's something that's a
bit more likely to hapen here than on most database hardware.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.us