Performance Showdown: Benchmarking PostgreSQL on metalstack.cloud

As businesses increasingly rely on cloud solutions to power their applications, the demand for high-performing, reliable database solutions has never been greater. At metalstack.cloud, we understand the critical role that performance plays in our clients' success. That's why we partnered CYBERTEC from Austria, renowned PostgreSQL experts, to conduct a benchmarking study across various cloud platforms.

Why benchmark databases?

Open source software is in our DNA and with PostgreSQL we get one of the robust and scalable Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) that is on the market. Perfect for showcasing how a system can handle demanding workloads, especially when it comes to read and write performance.

Using open source software also gives you full control over your systems and can help prevent vendor lock ins – something we particularly like.

The setup

The PostgreSQL experts at CYBERTEC spearheaded the benchmark setup to ensure accuracy and reliability. By designing the environment using the PostgreSQL benchmarking tool pgbench, we managed to get a comparison across multiple cloud platforms.

We selected Microsoft Azure, STACKIT’s Kubernetes Offering, Amazon Kubernetes Services (AKS) and metalstack.cloud as the contenders in our benchmarking showdown. Each platform was configured with an identical storage tier, ensuring a fair comparison of performance relative to cost.

On every platform we used two servers with 48 vCPUs and 192 GiB RAM each. We got the maximum storage tier available for the price point €449 / TiB Month. We then measured transaction times between the pods of two nodes using pgbench. The pgbenches always ran 3 times in one run, in total there were 2 runs.

The scale factor was 1250 and the working set size 16GiB. Synchronous commit and Prewarming was activated. The Kubernetes pod configuration looked as follows:

• CPU: 24
• Memory: 16 GiB
• PV-Storage: 50GiB

Figure 1: pgbench Setup: Transferring data from one worker to another.

Performance results

The results of our benchmarking study were impressive.

metalstack.cloud demonstrated superior performance, showcasing its ability to handle demanding database tasks with ease. And despite its performance, it remained cost-effective, offering exceptional value for money compared to its competitors.

Figure 2: Read Performance Results

Figure 3: Write Performance Results

Other findings

From the hyperscalers, Azure showed the highest performance in terms of transactions per second (TPS). AWS showed the lowest performance.

metalstack.cloud showed two times the performance of Azure for read-only.

With hyperscalers you can configure custom storage classes in Kubernetes to meet your needs. Heavy-load databases on cloud providers are possible - but they need to be chosen with caution!

Also, on AWS, Flash Storage did not get faster over the years.

Why is metalstack.cloud faster?

Firstly, our utilization of bare metal infrastructure eliminates the overhead associated with virtualization, enabling direct access to hardware resources and maximizing efficiency.

Coupled with our fast network infrastructure, data travels seamlessly across our network, minimizing latency and ensuring rapid response times. Furthermore, our adoption of all-flash storage accelerates data retrieval and processing, delivering consistently high throughput and reducing access latency.

This combination of bare metal architecture, high-speed networking and all-flash storage empowers businesses to achieve unparalleled performance and scalability for their PostgreSQL workloads on metalstack.cloud.

Acknowledgements

CYBERTEC’s invaluable contribution to this benchmarking initiative cannot be overstated. As PostgreSQL experts, their expertise and approach were instrumental in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the results. Their involvement reinforces metalstack.cloud's commitment to collaborating with industry leaders and Open Source software advocates to deliver superior performance and services.

CYBERTEC is a professional partner in PostgreSQL topics for over 20 years. As their main aim is to be your single-source all-in-one IT service provider, they offer a wide range of products and services. Go and visit their website for more details.

With Scalefield, they offer a modern and agile hosting platform. It allows you to easily host PostgreSQL clusters within your own private cloud. It’s flexible, scalable and reliable. Manage and store your data in a highly secure environment.

Conclusion

In the fiercely competitive landscape of cloud computing, performance is paramount. With metalstack.cloud, you can trust that your computing workloads will not only meet, but exceed your performance and your security expectations.

You can test metalstack.cloud for free by yourself. Visit metalstack.cloud and register today.