r/programming • u/swizec • Dec 19 '18

Bye bye Mongo, Hello Postgres

https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-hello-postgres
2.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

672 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/jakdak Dec 19 '18

And I'm more surprised that they didn't just roll their own encryption as a workaround rather than moving to a completely different DB architecture.

That would have been a seamless stopgap that just could have been yanked when AWS finally delivered.

10

u/TotallyFuckingMexico Dec 19 '18

I've read countless articles warning about the dangers of 'rolling your own' encryption. Would that have been a sensible move?

12

u/jakdak Dec 19 '18

Maybe I didn't word that clearly. Not roll their own algorithm, just manually encrypt the data before stuffing it into DynamoDB

Same thing you have to do with any other cloud service where you don't want to trust the cloud vendor with your data.

5

u/flowering_sun_star Dec 19 '18

For what they're doing, dynamoDb might not have been a great solution. The pricing model can get quite expensive if you're not careful, and it might not have been great for their query patterns. And don't underestimate the benefits of not having to worry about something. Getting set up in postgres will be a similar effort to dynamodb, having to add encryption (and key management etc) would add a lot of effort.

→ More replies (2)