Open and portable Postgres-as-a-service. Also available on Hetzner
ubicloud.com
ubicloud.com
Interesting play on words to only call this “open”, heavily implying that it’s open source (by pointing at “closed source” competition) when in fact Elastic v2 is not open source. Hard pass.
That’s the argument you hear every time there’s a re-license of what used to be “open source software”, and it may very well be true, but I don’t really care. I care about open source software and I’d rather see half-baked tools that are open source than shiny, fully featured tools that restrict the users and use the “open” terminology to gain traction only as long as it suits their own interests.
I agree with you on the sentiment about starting with a liberal license and then re-licensing once you gain enough adoption. We think it's only fair to our users that any re-licensing should go in the other direction.
I also had a clarification question, just to better understand. Which part of the Elastic V2 license do you find the most restrictive? (PS: We don't have license keys in Ubicloud. So, only directly competing against our managed service should apply.)
Some questions:
“ Select from 2 to 32 vCPUs; 8 GB - 64 GB RAM; 128 GB - 1 TB disk” how easy or fiddly is it for the end user to change specs? Are we responsible for migration?
Also, we can have as many databases as we want on our instance? Or just one?
Reiterating jpg’s question, does it have pgvector support?
What are your recommendations for connecting it to file store and/or blob store?
Do you have any support for backups?
Perhaps there is documention I missed, I read also the product and pricing pages.
- Yes, you can create multiple databases per instance.
- We don't support pgvector yet; initial extensions we have are those in contrib, with more to come.
- Going through a VM to fetch the data from/send data to file store is the most common
- We take backups automatically, with point-in-time-recovery available to the minute. We also allow you to "fork" a database using a similar approach: i.e. your database remains intact; you just add a new database to it from a past point in time (typically useful for dev, test and/or analytics)
Thank you, and yes, we will be in the US in the next few months.
I feel like this is going to take off, especially if you're targeting Hetzner.
With regards to the latter, have you guys thought about a cross vendor object storage offering? It's the #1 most requested service on Hetzner and they have repeadetly mentioned that they do not want to venture into this space. Feels like a low hanging fruit to take at this point.
Are you guys open for CV submissions? I'm a student from Germany and would love to intern / work for you guys and be a part of this. I've worked with OpenStack previously (though as an end user, not an admin) , which offers some AWS failover capabilities, but nothing truly like this.
And thank you, we are hiring. Could you send your CV to imagine at ubicloud dot com?
Object storage targets web developers, etc, but enabling certain machine learning patterns could be transformative.
Are these regions AWS regions? Does that mean you don't pay egress fees between your EC2 instance (or whatever) and the database? Does it mean that the latency is very low?
Extension support (pg vector) would be great.
(1) Looking at https://www.ubicloud.com/docs/about/pricing but your pricing on the landing page is almost 3 times higher https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql
https://www.ubicloud.com/docs/managed-postgresql/price-perfo...
Would be nice to see copy-and-paste instructions for setting up read replicas from RDS etc.
Not being snarky, but RDS is more than just a server app with a decent UI. It has specific advantages over just standing up a VPS and running apt install.
1: https://www.ubicloud.com/docs/managed-postgresql/backup-and-...
We're using the same core control plane approach that still powers multiple PostgreSQL services like Heroku Postgres, Citus/Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL and Crunchy Bridge. Ubicloud is being built by core members of the same teams that built those products, improved with learnings. We are yet in preview and not as feature complete, but we will continue adding more features, building them in the open.
https://www.postgresql.eu/events/pgconfeu2023/schedule/sessi...
Most customer support interactions I’ve had with German companies have been terse, but so far it’s never been inefficient. My last support interaction with Hetzner was something like (paraphrasing):
> Can you please open port 25 for outgoing traffic on my servers? Thank you
> Thank you for your request. It’s already open. It might be misconfigured. Please check your firewall rules. [link to docs]
So yeah, no “have a nice day”, no “please let us know if there’s anything more we can do”, but honestly I don’t want any of that stuff. It makes the interaction feel less honest and real, and I don’t expect everyone I interact with to (act like they) love their job, I just expect them to do their job. Maybe that’s the German mentality?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://github.com/neondatabase/helm-charts/issues/35
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31540691
[1]: or at least wasn't, I haven't kept up
It's a kubernetes operator for postgres with a pretty good range of features
Honestly I wish something of this standard existed for mysql - I'd never use RDS again by choice.
Their repo is public
Highlights:
- Your data and web services only touch open-source - Running top of Kubernetes - Postgres - Redis - Serverless PaaS - Self-host Oauth single sign-on - Mesh Networking/Security - Built-in operational tools - Machine Learning tools - Monitoring
https://www.batteriesincl.com/
If anyone wants a demo of the alpha state, my email is elliott@ batteriesincl.com.
The general plan is: write a SPDK module. We spent some of the last year getting used to using SPDK, for cryptography and workaday disk access, and the first copy-on-access custom bdev (a unit of abstraction in SPDK) is working its way into production now.
https://github.com/ubicloud/bdev_ubi
This copy-on-access happens to use files as the input, but sometime after that, it will be usable for demand-paging images hosted via HTTPS as well.
Some of those code paths will likely learn flavor(s) of replication after that.
The price comparison lands us to 2x cheaper than DO. They cost 130 USD. Ubicloud is 65.
Does it have zero downtime upgrades and HA?
We are currently self hosting postgres simply. But missing HA and zero downtime upgrades.
Thanks!
Also wouldn't recommend the new blue-green switch over yet. It fails safe yet when it goes sideways it can take a while to clean up.
I understand this complaint (I get both sides really) when it's a non OSI licence being called 'open source', but you can't just start extending that to the single words 'open' and 'source' too. 'I don't know what "source available" means, because it certainly doesn't mean available under open source licence', etc.
If you have a particular use-case in mind that you need but feel is limited, please let us know. Happy to talk through it and see how we can help.
I think the use of no-hosting clause is super ambiguous here because the nature of the project itself is hosting and providing managed services of VMs, postgres etc for users - so anyone using ubicloud is in some sense providing a managed or hosted service.
How about licensing under GPL or AGPL with a commercial license option? Corporations are so GPL-phobic that they would probably pay you for a commercial license.
For guidelines, see:
https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license/faq
Text:
I'm using Elasticsearch to put a search box on my cat-picture SaaS product.
This is permitted under ELv2. Meow!
I'm a contractor setting up Elasticsearch and Kibana for my clients to use internally.
This is permitted under ELv2, because you are not providing the software as a managed service.
My cat-picture SaaS product shows view-only Kibana dashboards of analytics on searches and views.
This is permitted under ELv2. The use of Kibana in this case is limited and this does not represent access to a substantial portion of the functionality of Kibana.
I am a Managed Service Provider (MSP) running Elasticsearch and Kibana for my customers.
If your customers do not access Elasticsearch and Kibana, this is permitted under ELv2. If your customers do have access to substantial portions of the functionality of either Elasticsearch and Kibana as part of your service, this may not be permitted.
I provide Elasticsearch and Kibana as a service, where my customers have direct access to substantial portions of the Elasticsearch APIs and Kibana UI.
This use is not permitted under the ELv2. Please reach out to us to discuss your options.
If you have questions about your specific scenario, please reach out to us at elastic_license@elastic.co.
If they open sourced, they'd need to compete against copy cats.
This is understandable. They need to protect themselves and maybe become profitable.
I would just prefer they didn't pretend to be so much different from AWS, Azure or GCP. This isn't open. The source is publicized, but not open. They discriminate, which goes against the essence of the open source principle.
I'm not saying your intention is to mislead, but it's at least confusing and will almost surely mislead some.
Why not use "visible code", or "transparent code", whatever...
That is probably why this project was careful to define itself as "Open" and did not use the term "open source". It is licensed under Elastic v2 which is generally known as a "source available" license
I don't see any problem with this as long as it is not advertised as open source, which it is not. Of course they are entirely within their rights to license their code as they see fit. I like to use open source software but I absolutely prefer source-available software over closed source solutions like their competitors (AWS, Azure, and GCP)
This is a good reminder to check the license before you adopt something. Just because the code is on Github, doesn't mean you can do anything with it.