Cloud or On-Prem? Where Should You Deploy Your PostgreSQL Databases?
Author: Phil Vacca | 4 min read | March 13, 2025
So, you’ve decided to ditch Oracle for PostgreSQL—now comes the next big decision: where to deploy it. Cloud? On-premises? A hybrid approach?
Each option has trade-offs:
- On-Premises PostgreSQL – Hosting your infrastructure gives you full control of your data. When you have to account for every aspect of data handling, or when ultra-high performance is more important than any other consideration, this is the only option. In highly regulated industries the demand for accountability may outweigh the significant investment in IT resources, but this approach lacks the many advantages that come with cloud-native, like auto-scaling and simplified maintenance.
- Cloud-Managed PostgreSQL (Amazon RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL) –Cloud managed databases, also known as Database as a Service or Platform as a Service databases, offer scalability, automatic handling of patches, upgrades, backups, and other tools to reduce maintenance overhead. The ease of use comes at a higher cost per workload. While some aspects are simplified, many enterprises find they still require expertise to tune data workloads and optimize for each cloud provider’s best practices.
- Self-Managed PostgreSQL on Cloud VMs (Amazon EC2, Azure VM) – Hosting virtual machines you provision on the cloud is a middle-ground solution that provides cloud benefits while retaining full control of maintenance schedules, tuning parameters, and the operating system. With a self-hosted approach, it requires experienced DBAs for optimization and maintenance.
- Hybrid PostgreSQL – A blend of on-premises and cloud, often used as a migration steppingstone, or for disaster recovery solutions. Setups like this require additional networking considerations and depend on a secure tunnel between the data center and the cloud region.
For most enterprises, cloud-managed PostgreSQL offers the best combination of scalability, security, and operational efficiency. But which cloud provider is right for you—AWS or Azure? That’s the focus of our final blog in this series.
Datavail has helped enterprises navigate PostgreSQL deployments across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments. Let’s design your optimal architecture.
