What makes this serverless?, adding an extra "tenant" layer does not affect it being run on one or more servers.
Specifically, Nile lets you do the following - Create a database and start querying it. Nile takes care of adding capacity to tenants as workload increases. - Pay for what you use. You will only pay for what you use. We have plans for pricing where you can pay based on usage per tenant. This will ensure your business value is aligned with the cost of your database. For example, a customer on your free tier may not be an active user and you would not pay for them in Nile. - We have built multitenancy into Postgres and a gateway layer that routes. This helps us to scale to zero with instant availability when you want to scale back up.
- You can create even a million tenants if you have that many customers. - We have built connection pooling into Nile. This helps to provide limitless connections as you grow
I'm still trying to understand the scaling story better. When we say serverless it mentions automatically scaling when it detects some sense of resource pressure. If I have a "hot tenant-database", does that mean this shard will be scaled automatically without impact to existing queries? Or would there be some "blip". I suppose it's unavoidable in edge cases but curious about the regular ones as well.
It's an incredibly cool CX you have here with the automated query routing/tenancy story though, looking forward to what happens in this space.
The first meaning I was familiar with was the idea that there was no long-running process operating a service. This was like a lambda, executing upon a trigger and then stopping.
The second meaning I learned about more recently was the idea of "serverless" being an abstraction layer, where you don't think about what server the service is deployed on (specifically, you get to stop caring about the resources allocated to that server), even though it is deployed as a continuous, long-running process.
I was also only aware of your first definition of serverless.
AWS Lambda lets you think about "invocations" and not CPU and you trust that the CPU will show up when needed. At Nile we hope to let you focus on "queries per sec" and even "queries per second per tenant" while we scale the infrastructure as needed for you.
Incidentally, our product has a dashboard that shows you exactly these metrics :)
AWS Lambda has a default concurrency limit of 1k and each function has a configurable memory limit.
Sure, those limits allow for a lot more elasticity and flexible pricing but the limitations haven't disappeared.
Also, there are now some 'serverless' hosting providers that do fixed monthly pricing (fermyon.com/pricing). Isn't this taking the best part of serverless ad absurdum or is there something I'm missing?
Lastly, I hope I don't sound argumentative. I work for a company that has the described problem of multi-tenant SaaS and I love Postgres, so I am fully supportive of your mission!