We have a production RDS database that is not managed by convox. It would be nice if we could incorporate it into our application resources. However, creating a new database through convox and migrating it will require too much downtime. Is there a way we could either:
What are the benefits of managing the database via Convox, when it isnāt ephemeral/scalable in nature?
Isnāt it better to manage it outside of Convox?
I suppose so. What I appreciate about a Convox-managed database is that it is bound to the proper VPC and the cx proxy command can provide secure access. I know thatās stuff I can set up myself, but the value of Convox is not having to manage that myself and risk mis-configuring it.
Another benefit is that as we regularly create and destroy non-production environments, and those databases are ephemeral. Is there a way to make some distinction between the two in convox.yml?
Something that I really appreciate is being able to proxy to the resources - that is very useful.
It turns out that you can initialize a database from a snapshot using the DatabaseSnapshotIdentifier option, at least when creating a gen 1 (convox rack resources) resource. Iām investigating if this works for gen 2 (convox.yml-defined) resources as well.
@julian did you find any solutions w.r.t. gen 2 resources? (inquiring before I investigate myself 
@brandontruong Right now we are using a hack:
We define a gen-2 resource in our convox.yml which is used for most environments. Then we have our production resource as a gen-1 resource, and during deployment to production, or CI job rewrites our convox.yml file to remove the gen-2 definition.
Itās particularly fragile, because if someone tries to deploy to production manually, it will end up creating a new gen-2 resource and sending all traffic to it. Havenāt found a solution to this yet. I asked about adding a option to disable gen-2 resources via env vars, but no response.
Iām still open to other suggestions on how to solve this.
Bumping this as weāre migrating from gen1 to gen2 right now and now faced with the same problem.
I am surprised that itās not possible to define a snapshot ARN for app-based postgres like you can for rack resources.
Likewise is there no solution to disable resources or services? With gen-1 we used the ā-1ā scale parameter but that now fails.
Our convox.yml got complicated enough per-environment that we started generating it with code for our main app. Itās still not great but thereās less concern of accidentally creating an app-level resource in production.
Since the initial post, Iāve learned some go and I donāt think adding support for disabling app-level resources would be very difficult. It seems to me the Convox team has gen-2 in maintenance mode but will accept PRs.
I am surprised that itās not possible to define a snapshot ARN for app-based postgres like you can for rack resources.
There is DMS which might work for you instead of initializing from a snapshot. IIRC it didnāt work for us for a very particular issue related to escaping Postgres JSONB columns but you may not run into the issue (and they may have fixed it by now anyway).
With gen-1 we used the ā-1ā scale parameter but that now fails.
IIRC with gen-2 services you can just set scale=0 instead of scale=-1. In gen-1, ā-1ā disabled the load balancer also but since gen-2 uses ALB instead of ELB thereās only one load balancer so thereās no more need to it off to save money.
That doesnāt apply to resources though.