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Comment by WatchDog | Hacker News Reader

This offering seems a lot more compelling than the serverless databases offered by AWS directly.

At least if cost and scaling to zero is important to you. Dynamodb addresses the cost issue, but it's so painful to use, and is unsuitable for a lot of use-cases. Aurora Serverless takes 30 seconds to cold-start, so it's also usually a non-starter, other than for batch type workloads.

So great work, but I have a couple of questions:

Any plans to support AWS privatelink? I played around with this a bit, and it seems you need to connect to it over the internet which isn't always ideal.

Will there be a limit on how many free databases you can create? I think there are some valid use-cases where one might want to create a bunch of them, but I would be scared to do this at the risk of being kicked off your platform for abuse.

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Our product roadmap will be heavily influenced by customer asks. So if there are things about CockroachDB Serverless that prevent you from using it (like requiring ingress through a public IP), we definitely want to hear about it.

Regarding a cluster limit, we currently allow up to 5 clusters per customer account. I'd like to hear what kind of use-cases you have in mind for having a lot more clusters. One I've thought about is CI runs, where you'd want dozens or hundreds of temporary clusters running at once, in order to run your testing in parallel.

I guess two main use-cases come to mind, providing isolated multi-tenant saas services, also easily creating test/dev environments.

In a similar vein to how you have made cockroach multi-tenant, not too long ago I worked on building a multi-tenant sass version of a business intelligence app. The app uses a relational DB, initially we used separate schemas on the same db cluster, but we had problems with noisy neighbors, as well as concerns about it's security.

We later opted to run dedicated database clusters for each tenant, however it greatly increases the marginal cost, and makes it difficult to provide a free tier of service, which is a valuable way to gain new customers.

I think you're right on target with the multi-tenant SAAS services. They often suffer from the "long-tail" problem, where the tiny customers without much usage cost too much to host. And of course, that's one of the big problems the CockroachDB Serverless architecture solves.

There's no technical reason why CockroachDB Serverless couldn't support that scenario - it's more of a product/business/sales question. I think we'd be very open to talking with companies that have that kind of problem to solve.

The main thing that's keeping me from moving to cockroachDB is that it doesn't support triggers. Once triggers are supported, I'll jump out of aws in a millisecond.

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