Rethinking PostgreSQL Storage

Time to Rethink PostgreSQL Storage Burak Yucesoy Principal Software Engineer Cloud storage was built around the limits of old hardware. Spinning hard drives (HDDs) were slow and fragile. So, early on cloud providers moved storage off of servers. They used network-attached disks to boost durability and scalability. But hardware has evolved. Today, you can get 2.5 million IOPS from a $600 NVMe SSD [1]. By contrast, pushing 2.5 million IOPS through Aurora would cost you $1.3M per month. With NVMe SSDs being faster, cheaper, and more reliable, it's time to rethink PostgreSQL storage. In this post, we’ll walk through how we got here, what’s changed, and why local NVMe SSDs are the future of cloud databases. We'll also share benchmarks comparing performance on different disk architectures. Database Storage over the Years Before the cloud, databases typically ran on local hard drives (HDDs). This provided low latency for sequential reads but introduced two challenges. Each HDD had a sin ... Read full article.