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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

The lack of “managed” Postgres is the only reason we haven’t moved 100% to fly.

The idea of having to do my own upgrades by updating the docker container scares me.

I have literally never run a stateful service off docker and don’t see the point, thanks to AWS.

RDS has been extremely stable and boring. Maybe it’s out together by similar duct tape under the hood but it’s been incredibly solid for nearly a decade across multiple database stacks.

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What stops you from using a managed database from a provider who specializes in it?

If Fly builds it, it will create another Goliath who tries to eat everything.

Not really. I see fly competing with Workers for smaller services, and with KV and D1, managed edge DBs are so easy it’s hard to live without them. Very different use case from a traditional managed DB - because it’s either all scaling and running in fly or it isn’t.

Network posture? I can’t imagine trying to put the public internet in between my app servers and db.

Doesn't fly.io have tailscale integration?

You still need to go over a public network (as opposed to a network inside a data center.)

what makes a network private?

The point the OP wanted to make was:

Servers sitting less than 1km to each other tend to have lesser latency between them, compared to servers that could be anywhere on the public internet.

Ah because I am interpreting it more at the logical level and about them venturing out into unknown territories (the packets are traversing routers I do not control), rather than just latency. Since others have mentioned that latencies are very low if you locate in the same region.

But if you have a zero-trust architecture and everything communicates over wireguard, then technically public or private won't matter right?

Not saying public/private IPs don't matter – since almost all the servers would still only have private IPs.

In a sense this is more like VPC peering.

With IPv6, you can have all public IPs (the same as early days of IPv4). However, if you have apps that are tightly coupled and often with strict latency requirements such as Web <-> DB, then it's better to communicate only over private links. You can control latency and you have better reaction time when something breaks down. That is in addition to security concerns.

I remember a failure of one transatlantic line that was used for one direction of packets we were sending between EU and US. I spent a night on a phone trying to convince AWS and our other datacenter operator to work around the problem by changing their routing and to push the backbone operator to fix the problem - we didn't have any relationship with the backbone of course.

You don't want such disruption to happen in a core part of your app. These disruptions can also be intermittent and "random" and you have no way to fix.

An RFC 1918 address range and an implementation that does not transmit data over infrastructure not owned by the network operator.

I think I know what you're getting at, and if I'm right, this isn't really a subjective or squishy subject.

I wonder if we're moving to an unbundling phase of the cloud.

The only reason I think we might not be is the selling point is less vendor lock-in, not something managed significantly better. For the most part, the major cloud providers have mature, feature rich product offerings for common use cases like DB, distributed queues, running services, load balancers, etc.

I hope we're unbundling! RDS is fine, but it doesn't really offer me (as an app dev ... sometimes) much. PlanetScale is a better MySQL: https://planetscale.com/blog/introducing-planetscale-boost

Are you guys looking at a partner program where a lot of the managed postgres companies could also provide managed postgres but on top of your infra? (like they do with GCP/AWS/etc)

> What stops you from using a managed database from a provider who specializes in it?

A lack of integrated security and authorization? Should be solvable though.

The expense of external traffic? The latency to a DB in a different datacenter?

That latency was the deal breaker for me. Kind of defeats having your app running on metal near your customers if they're in Dallas and the DB's in Ohio

This is an advantage of the big public clouds. Any SaaS you could want is deployed into the same region as your application, so it's essentially co-located and on the same playing field as one of the native public cloud services.

With Fly.io (at least today), this isn't as straightforward given your favorite database is likely not deployed there.

Even at the minimal scale, one is going to have quite a few app instances all over the world sooner or later. In such setting, a notion of regional proximity of any kind quickly becomes irrelevant.

Higher database round-trip times are fixed by using database stored procedures instead of making multitudes of tiny compound SQL queries.

Not everything can be represented by a single database query. Often there is mixing involved using multiple sources, which break down the one query for all results pattern, and thus encourage co-locating the database near the tier making the db requests.

I’m planning on moving to fly.io, and I’m exploring cloud-based databases. Specifically Planetscale and CockroachDB.

https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/planetscale/

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