Question

Is it possible to have an app running at aws EC2 and have it’s database running at heroku’s postgres?
In case it is, what are the downsides I should consider?
Since heroku is hosted at AWS, is there a way to know where is the location of the machine running my database?
Hosting my app in the same region of the database would help to keep the performance?
I would like to hear some opinions about this, I’ve been searching the topic without much success.

Answer 1

You can determine the public-facing location of your Heroku DB at any given time with a traceroute … but there’s no guarantee that it’ll stay at that location, or that there isn’t any internal re-routing going on. You’d probably want to speak directly with Heroku support about ways to make sure your Heroku DB instances are local to your AWS application instances, as that certainly would benefit performance. See if you can find out which availability zone, or at least which major region, they run the DB in, and whether you can “pin” your database instance to a given region/zone.

Amazon’s RDS looks OK, but doesn’t support PostgreSQL. Please keep nagging them to.

I’d probably just run the DB on AWS if performance wasn’t particularly important. Use a raid10 of provisioned IOPS EBS volumes on an EBS-optimized instance and you’ll get kind-of-ok performance (but at a really big price); alternately, you can use non-crash-safe ssd-based instance store servers and rely on replication and backups to keep your data safe.