I'm curious about what "substantially better than RDS" means. RDS has been good enough for me for quite a while. Does it only matter once you get to a certain scale?
Good enough may be absolutely fine for a lot of people, but no lock-in to a single cloud, better developer tooling, proactive alerts and recommendations, quality support all feel like an opportunity to be better.
Kurt may have entirely other things in mind, and would be all ears if there is low hanging fruit in terms of feature or experience we can do to make Postgres even better for folks.
Some examples of the things I've missed around developer experience for a database, that Craig and the team made possible at Heroku Postgres, include:
- fork: ever had one of those "why does this bug only exist in production?" problems? It was so trivial to fork the DB and run your tests/hypothesis/whatever without the risk of actually impacting production. Same thing for _really_ testing a migration script or load test.
- follow: a similarly easy approach for getting a read replica which is super useful for generating reporting.
- dataclips: "hey, can you tell me X?" sure, and here's a URL to the results that you can refresh if you need an updated number in the future. So great for adhoc queries.
All of these are obviously doable with RDS and/or other solutions too. But the time taken to do any of the above was often measured in seconds, at most minutes. It's difficult to communicate just how impactful those kind of improvements are to your workflow. It's like it subconsciously gives you permission to tackle whole new problems, build better solutions, get answers to questions you never thought to ask before. Because the barrier to entry is so low you just do these things. You don't sit around wondering if you could.
A great developer experience around a database (one that goes beyond setup and basic ops) is a severely under appreciated thing IMO.
This sounds great! How does it work though? Is it using some special postgres feature or btrfs snapshots or something else completely?
- restore from the latest snapshot (there was one whether you’d configured a custom backup schedule or not)
- replay the write ahead log over the top to catch the restore up to the point in time you asked for/when you ran the command. At least some part of this process leveraged WAL-E, which was a tool largely developed by Heroku employees and open sourced.
This was a decade or more ago though. The state of the art of postgres has moved on and I assume the team would tackle it differently if they were doing it today.
Doing the native approach in Postgres isn't perfect, but we've focused on getting the developer experience for it down so you can use your database and it "just work" and if something goes wrong you understand how to rollback seamlessly.
The good DBaaS give me a lot more power. This is true for Heroku PG, PlanetScale, Supabase, and Crunchy Data. Some of them let me fork a DB to run a PR against, some give me app level features that save me code, etc.
Most modern hosted DBs also let you run your own replicas.
I'm not really complaining about how well RDS works when your app is connected to it and it doesn't failover/go down for maintenance/etc. It works fine as a DB backend. That's just a baseline I don't think is very valuable anymore.
Anyone else have any idea if there's a better option??
RDS makes it very inconvenient to do anything other than use their managed services.
because RDS backup data storage is VERY EXPENSIVE even compared to s3. this is very deliberate.
no affiliation. just a customer.
at the time we picked aiven, we couldn’t find any redis-specialized hosting with instances in GCP europe if I recall. so their breadth also plays in terms of locating near the customer servers (important for latency)