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Comment by nikita | Hacker News Reader

Serverless environments are a matter of fact. They exist, they are super convenient, and people want to use Postgres in them. This is a bridge for such people. Yes, it requires some sophisticated engineering, but it also enables to have less boilerplate code for a lot of people.

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I think if this particular logic is hidden away behind a server, it doesn't really matter - people want convenience, and for someone else to hide the complexity.

Serverless postgres-as-a-service isn't a stretch at all.

This thread does remind me of a previous thread, I believe it was something like optimizing a basic string operation (concatenation?) by going down to assembly and SIMD. Few people have a need to know the details of that particular implementation, and mere mortals cannot comprehend the wizardry going on there either, but that's just fine because if it gets incorporated into standard libraries or the underlying implementations that said standard libraries use, everybody benefits without ever having to understand the inner workings.

Unless it breaks one day and no one knows why

Also known as layers of abstractions. The entirety of (software) technology is built on that concept.

Sure, you want the easiest thing possible that fulfills the common use cases. But right now serverless isn't there quite yet. Having persistent Postgres connections is a really basic requirement that the serverless platforms should've implemented already.

Heroku and similar things are the sweet spot right now for me. I don't have to deal with much, and I get exactly the amount of flexibility that I need. Sure it'd be a little nicer not to deal with Express on my own in a NodeJS environment, but right now it's easier to deal with than it is to avoid. Some day I'll happily go serverless.

Things are getting more serverlesss too. With Deno Deploy, Cloudflare Workers, etc I see myself eventually wanting to run most of my application on platforms like this, and a serverless & distributed database makes that much easier and I expect it’ll probably perform better in many cases too.

100%

I've been doing "serverless" on app engine for more than a decade and it handles postgres connections fine without any heroics.

There's always instances with state somewhere; it's just a question of how smart your serverless infrastructure is about pooling the instances.

The “serverless” being referred to in the article is run using V8 isolates, whereas app engine runs full Node.js processes. Although they have limitations like not supporting raw TCP, isolates can start within a couple milliseconds and are much more CPU efficient than standalone processes.

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