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Comment by qaq | Hacker News Reader

I guess a good opportunity for someone to build a good alternative. Although it's hard to get it right because if you scale to 0 people will complain about latency and if you don't it's not really serverless.

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SQL Server on Azure has an auto pause feature. All of our QA and dev instances use this. Seems to work reasonably well for us.

Do they auto-wake when you query them? How long does auto-wake take?

Yes - takes about 10-30 seconds in my experience.

What alternative does someone need to make to compete with AWS?

I mean if you scale to 0, you should expect cold start latency.

Well yes and no if you had enough resources imaging something like Spanner but highly optimised for multi-tenancy. There will be higher latency because inactive tenant's data got purged from caches but it would be nowhere near the latency of spining up a postgres instance. You could even have a smart stats layer that tracks usage and keeps some minimal amount of inactive tenants data in memory to minimize latency.

There is a good alternative, https://neon.tech check them out. Really good bunch. Product is great and it's open-sourced https://github.com/neondatabase/neon

I'll note that the storage engine is open-source as well as any Postgres modifications, but our control plane is closed-source. I work at Neon.

Neon is only scale-to-zero from the point of view of the tenants; whoever runs the software, must keep nodes running, including triple-replicated WAL storage.

Corporate customers that runs AWS, GCP or Azure at not looking for alternative outside of their cloud providers. Most solution architecture are designed with the assumption that all your ressources will be inside the same vnet or subnet, in a given cloud provider. And I am not talking about any egress fees yet.

I challenge this. I work at Aiven and we provide alternate cloud-independent solutions, sometimes in the customer’s own account, and enterprise customers definitely see the value in using a fixed cost, no-lock-in service.

Well just one counterexample Snowflake

I think the problem is that we're trying to take paradigms that are designed to be serverful (is that a word?) and shoe-horn them into working in a serverless way.

(Neon CEO).

It's possible and here is the recipe: https://twitter.com/nikitabase/status/1725394843285766463

Always gotta watch what you say on Hacker News or the CEO of the company you're talking about might just arrive outta nowhere with the elbow drop of justice.

It helps but does not fully solve it if I need PG to have 512 GB of memory buffers under load to have reasonable latency starting from 0 and going through a number of VM migrations to finally get to properly sized VM with 512 GB of hot data in memory gonna cause a ton of latency.

The buffers will be cached in remote storage - so it will just work likely.

In the future we are considering separating the buffer pool from compute and turning off compute doesn't drop the buffer cache. It's a research project but PolarDB did that for AliCloud.

"Remote buffers" sounds like it'd introduce a base level of latency anyway.

Though computers are pretty fast these days (and RDMA exists), so if the pieces are in the same data centre and using good interconnects it's probably not going to make much of a practical difference.

... which does not refute the parent post's statement ;)

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