Hacker News Reader

Comment by craigkerstiens | Hacker News Reader

Craig from Citus here. Thanks for the kind words. We've seen a lot of people scale-out transactional workloads with Citus as well. In particular, we've seen a lot of multi-tenant apps that need to keep scaling beyond a single node when they're running into memory or compute issues.

If you are looking for something that is more Postgres flavored (meaning we're just an extension to it so you get all the good stuff of Postgres such as JSONB, PostGIS, etc.) then we hope we'd be a good fit. And we run a managed service on top of AWS as well (https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud) built by the team that built Heroku Postgres. If curious on pricing you can find it at https://www.citusdata.com/pricing/

View on HN

It would be very interesting to have your product at the 200-300$ pricepoint. Currently, the lowest tier starts at almost 2000$ per month for the high availability version.

I'm not trying to compare on a per-mb level, but it would be nice for smaller scale workloads.

Helpful feedback, we do have a development plan for $99, but it's not really intended for production workloads. If you only have 10 GB of data we'd heavily recommend going with something like RDS or Heroku Postgres. At that amount of data single node Postgres works great.

RDS is not single node - its multi-AZ replicated. And that's what we are paying 300$ instead of 99$ for.

Imagine.. RDS is literally the ONLY place where you can buy a 10 GB data multi-AZ replicated, snapshotted and managed postgresql.

Its pretty much a monopoly, now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql.

> Imagine.. RDS is literally the ONLY place where you can buy a 10 GB data multi-AZ replicated, snapshotted and managed postgresql.

Not true. I was looking for a hosted Postgres provider and discovered these two:

https://aiven.io/postgresql (tried it, worked excellently)

https://www.elephantsql.com

> now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql.

I would be hesitant to say that this is a fact.

>Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql.

Er, that's a bet I'd strongly suggest you didn't make.

Right? Apps written to use Postgres aren't just going to be re-written to use Spanner.

If anything, hosted Postgres from Google Cloud will be priced in a way that makes Spanner some what more attractive, as a way to get conversions to Spanner in the long-run.

There are several managed hosting companies that will run Postgres (and other databases) for you on public clouds. Compose, Aiven, ElephantSQL, Database Labs, Heroku, etc. There are all kinds of price points and GCP is working on supporting postgres internally.

How many nodes are you looking to run for $300/month? Unless you have more than 150gb/node of data, you don't really need a distributed database which is what Citus is for.

not at the price point that RDS is at. the starting cost of a multi - az deployment is lower. For a startup thats just starting out, it is the best and safest choice. Even heroku, but im not very sure about its reliability versus rds.

Please note what im paying for is availability and reliability.. not for a database per se.

And im not even talking Aurora. That stuff is going to blow every other price point out of the water at probably higher reliability metrics.

> Its pretty much a monopoly, now that Google seems to have officially closed the book on ever supporting postgresql.

Uh, how? I wouldn't be surprised to see a Cloud SQL-like managed Postgres service from Google.

While there's obviously some overlap in the potential market for any relational datastore service, Spanner doesn't really overlap with a cloud Postgres service as much as Cloud SQL does.

I would be. its been years and google and has been building out various pieces of infrastructure around mysql - including cloud spanner.

the issue is that the migration path of self hosted mysql to cloud sql to spanner is pretty well defined. I dont see postgresql being strategically important or relevant to google for anything.

if I was a startup deciding on my database, there's a lot less compelling reasons to choose postgresql from the point of view of long term viability. hell, I can pretty much do a back of the envelope calculation on how much will it cost me to support 100 million users on mysql.

Is it safe to think that Evernote and Snapchat - startups who are giant success stories - are google mysql hosted? (in some form.. maybe even spanner)

So uber, snapchat, Google, Evernote and a clear cut path for upward scale.

I have very less hope for postgresql on google cloud.

You keep saying this - have you actually talked to them? Find some PMs and send a few emails. Postgres is definitely in progress.

> its been years and google and has been building out various pieces of infrastructure around mysql - including cloud spanner.

What does Cloud Spanner have to do with MySQL? It's neither API nor SQL-dialect compatible with MySQL. If there are MySQL bits used somewhere in the implementation, they are well hidden, and irrelevant to users.

> the issue is that the migration path of self hosted mysql to cloud sql to spanner is pretty well defined.

So what? Were there a Cloud SQL-like Postgres offering, the same would be true; Spanner is no closer to MySQL than Postgres. (If anything, it's SQL dialect is a little closer to Postgres's dialect than MySQL's, though not so much that you'll get away without doing substantial conversion going from either.)

RDS is only multi-AZ if you want it to be (and are willing to pay twice as much).

I really like your attitude towards something like this, when your product would be an overkill for a use case and you just recommend a different product. I also really like your blog posts about Postgres, we use it a lot for developers explaining a bunch of internals, like the one with how to paginate in Postgres.

Link to blog post?

I believe this is the one they're referring to on pagination: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2016/03/30/five-ways-to-pagin...

Though hopefully you'll find many more useful ones about Citus and Postgres broadly on our blog: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com