How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to PostgreSQL with no downtime

Re:How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to Postg... by whalesalad on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @11:52AM (#4778931)

Did you guys consider Heroku PostgreSQL? It's inside of AWS. If so, can you shed some light on why you opted against it? I don't want to sound like a fanboy of Heroku (I am not) but I am just interested in whether or not you guys considered it.

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Re:How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to Postg... by simonw on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @11:56AM (#4778962)

We didn't - it's a fantastic product (I'm really impressed with how easy they've made it to set up followers and forks) but we were ready to move to dedicated hardware. It's also a pretty expensive option.

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Re:How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to Postg... by whalesalad on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @01:13PM (#4779519)

Thanks for the response.

I used to agree with you on the price until I realized that with Heroku you're essentially paying for a dedicated server with that much RAM for each plan. Reason being, every single database is "hot" and the entire thing lives in memory to avoid I/O.

On second glance ... you're right. It is kind of pricey.

Speaking of moving to dedicated.. I'd love to hear some of your general feedback on how AWS has been at some point. Essentially where you'd use it again or where you'd go directly to dedicated (or a diet option like a VPS) if you were starting on a new project.

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Re:How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to Postg... by gsibble on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @11:58AM (#4778977)

I've worked in similar environments and Heroku is crazy expensive and slow compared to dedicated hardware.

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Re:How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to Postg... by jaequery on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @12:39PM (#4779292)

sad thing is, most people don't realize how slow they are. once they move off to dedicated w/ SSD, their site starts to run blazing fast (plus at a fraction of the cost) and say to themselves why they haven't done this sooner.

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Re:How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to Postg... by joevandyk on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @05:09PM (#4780921)

Do SSDs improve performance with PostgreSQL if most of your data fits in ram?

I guess it depends on the type of workload (reads vs writes).

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Re:How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to Postg... by X-Istence on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @06:02PM (#4781130)

Yes, it improves performance because PostgreSQL wants to write data out to disk before returning.

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Re:How Lanyrd moved from AWS to SoftLayer and MySQL to Postg... by gsibble on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @01:09PM (#4779495)

Indeed. Most companies don't have the operational experience to optimize for speed until they are later stage. Also, they will develop on something like Heroku and get addicted to the ease of use.

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