Comment by jabiko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jabiko | Hacker News Reader

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While I think that TimescaleDB is a great technology, the support experience of their Timescale Cloud offering was quite underwhelming.

In one occurrence we wanted to create a VPC peering between the a database hosted on Timescale Cloud and our Kubernetes cluster hosted on Azure. For this you need to put the Azure resource group name in a form on Timescale cloud.

Turns out our resource group name contained an uppercase character and the form on Timescale Cloud has a (broken) validation that required the name to be all lowercase. We couldn't easily change that name since that would have required us to re-create our production AKS/K8S cluster.

After contacting Timescale support (as a paying customer) the answer was basically: "Well, we require the resource group name to be lowercase, we can't change that, sucks to be you, bye"

We can live without that VPC peering, so we didn't push that further, but there are zero technical reasons for that restrictions and I would bet that its just a broken validation regex in their backend that they are unwilling to fix.

Hi there, sorry you had a negative experience with Timescale Cloud.

It's true that on Azure we require both the resource group name and also the Virtual Network name to be in lowercase.

But Microsoft names are case-agnostic, so this should be okay.

We've had other customers with this issue before and converting the resource group name to be lowercase worked for them.

Also, sometimes technical restrictions exist for internal reasons that are not obvious / hard to share externally. :-)

That said, I shared your message internally and someone is looking into this. Stay tuned. More soon.

Hi, thanks you. I'm really grateful for your answer. The Azure documentation seems to hint at the resource group name being case insensitive, so I guess that could actually work. To be honest I don't know if we tried just using a lowercase version.

Again, I want to emphasize that I find it really great that you took the time to answer here.

Hey there. I'm responsible for support here at Timescale. akulkarni asked me to take a look at this.

To be fair, I don't have a good answer on why the input box does require the resource group name to be lowercase, but I ran through the steps end-to-end, and as akulkarni said, the names are case agnostic on the Azure side, so you'd just need to input the resource group name lower case to create it successfully.

Sincerely, thank you for the feedback, as this is how we learn and improve. If you give this a shot and run into any trouble, please do let us know, and we'd be happy to help troubleshoot.

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