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by penguinpower 928 days ago
> a new capability supporting automated horizontal scaling to process millions of write transactions per second and manage petabytes of data in a single Aurora database.

Limitless horizontal scaling is really cool and all, but does anyone not running a Fortune-500 Tech company actually need this kind of firepower?
4 comments
Aeolun 928 days ago
The people running a fortune 500 company are the majority of AWS income? I’d say it’s very relevant to them.
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jitl 928 days ago
At Notion we run ~100 Postgres instances and we’re pretty far off from being Fortune 500, although we have many Fortune 500 clients. We could have used this Aurora thing instead of doing sharding in the application ourselves: https://www.notion.so/blog/sharding-postgres-at-notion
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nojvek 927 days ago
Separation of compute and storage, and storage having tables being sharded is now in many modern databases (cockroachdb, clickhouse and singlestore come to mind).

This being part of native aws fully postgres compatible is exciting though.

I wish AWS brings columnstore or custom storage engine features.

But I can see why AWS wouldn’t want to bring columnstore tables - it would directly compete with redshift.

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acdha 928 days ago
AWS does a lot of enterprise business but I’d also think about it as setting the upper bounds: you probably don’t need millions of transactions per second but if you’re a startup needing, say, thousands it’s nice knowing that you don’t need to fundamentally rearchitect for a while even if you become popular. The pain of hitting the limits of a single database write node can be high because you need to make substantial changes to what is by definition a busy system, but you have an incentive not to make the big changes until you need them since they make everything else more work. This gives you the option of effectively never needing to do that, which is going to be popular with anyone anticipating lots of growth if it delivers as advertised.
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bdcravens 928 days ago
Most AWS products outside of the core group (EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, etc) are for the enterprise or venture-backed startups.
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