15 ms·

Digital Ocean Managed Databases

337 points by JonoBB 8y ago

whitepoplar 8y ago
Wow, this is fantastic news! I think this opens the floodgates for lots of people who currently use Heroku, and would like to use simple VPS's without jumping into the headache that is AWS. Any word on pricing?
- jkchu 8y ago
  What are your objections/concerns against using AWS? I have used it both for work and in personal projects and haven't ran into any issues/headaches.
  - beatgammit 8y ago
    Personally, I find AWS's pricing complicated, and there are so many different services that it's confusing. I think it's mostly a UX issue, but it's really overwhelming. DO, Lonnie Linode, and Vultr are very simple, so that's what I use. Perhaps if I start needing more from my hosting I'll look at AWS, but it's just not worth my time to figure it out for the scale of projects I'm doing.
  - whitepoplar 8y ago
    AWS just seems too complicated to me. I like to spin up simple VMs (with local storage) without any surprises.
  - qaq 8y ago
    For one thing you have no fixed monthly cost on AWS
nbst 8y ago
Holy crap, the fact this was missing is really the only reason I use Google Cloud for my projects.
bovermyer 8y ago
This is good news. I look forward to seeing the managed MySQL option.
- thinkshiv 8y ago
  yes, it's next on our roadmap of engines. I work at DO FYI.
teilo 8y ago
It's nice that we are finally at a point where PG is the first offering, instead of the "Coming Soon."
- teknico 8y ago
  It is nice indeed. Also, PostgreSQL is described as powerful, reliable, full-featured, and fast, while MySQL as the most popular: that's all. What is not said can be as important as what is.
nerdywordy 8y ago
I for one have always liked the simplicity of DO for hosting but I've never wanted to take on the full liability of self-rolling a DB server (and backups and replicas). So everything my company has I've put on heroku or azure. This has potential to be really significant as I'd wager there are a lot of folks in similar situations.
- sdegutis 8y ago
  If you have a relatively small set of users, setting up your own database is usually as simple as setting it up locally and you won't need shards or anything. And setting up backups is as simple as adding a cron job that calls your backup shell script, which you can test separately. And by "small set of users", consider what SQLite's own website[1] says: Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic. If SQLite is able to comfortably handle 100k hits/day, I imagine that more "legitimate" databases can handle more traffic comfortably without needing to jump to scale horizontally. [1] https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html under "Websites" section
  - whitepoplar 8y ago
    The real benefit to having someone else manage your DB is that it eliminates the "unknown unknowns." I don't want to spend the requisite time becoming an expert DB sysadmin--I'd rather let someone else do it so that I can sleep at night. Also, databases are in a different category of risk. Misconfigure an nginx config? No big deal, fix it and move on. Set up your database incorrectly, resulting in data loss down the road? Could be game over.
  - Scarbutt 8y ago
    Agree sqlite is great and >80% of websites will probably run fine on it, but 100K hits/day is pretty vague, does that mean 1 hit/sec or 3 hits/sec during peak time, etc...?
jagger27 8y ago
Well that news just made feel great about picking Postgres for my current SaaS project. Definitely going to be migrating over once I get access! I wonder how long they've been working on this.
- thinkshiv 8y ago
  We've been working on this for some time. We announced earlier in the year that we want to offer this type of a managed service and we will start with one engine for now. Disclosure: I lead Products at DigitalOcean.
tumblen 8y ago
Thinking about moving from Linode to DO just for this. Makes so much sense. Would be great to have something similar for Redis.
bonsai80 8y ago
I don't see any mention of the cost. Is that listed somewhere?
- strig 8y ago
  I'm guessing it will just be the cost of the droplet that it's installed on.
  - michaelcampbell 8y ago
    Sadly (as DO explained, perhaps after you posted), no.
- thinkshiv 8y ago
  Hi there, this is Shiv - I am the VP of Product at DigitalOcean. Thanks for asking about pricing. We are still working out the pricing details. I can tell you it won't be just the cost of the Droplet because this is a managed service with lots of additional features that you would not get with the current Droplet product.
  - wjdp 8y ago
    This is something that has put me off services like this for personal / open source projects. I'm time and cost limited and usage will be minimal so both the expense of a managed service and the time cost of setting up my own are both unattractive. Would DO be open to a limited 'hobby tier' for this set at the price of the droplet?
  - apapli 8y ago
    If you can offer some sort of “hobby” plan with a limited I/O and DB size that would be great for hobby projects like what I build. I’ve used RDS before and it is great, but the cost is a bit eye watering when we are talking about less than one user every 10 minutes. I’ve found Jaws DB works well for my needs (and pricing), but given they are layered on AWS it does feel like I’m still a bit limited - ie it would be good to still access the DB server so I can spin up multiple DBs (pre-prod, production etc), despite my usage being minimal. If DO can hit a sub $10pm price point (even with severely restricted performance) that would be awesome!
thegeekpirate 8y ago
This is fantastic timing—I didn't feel like dealing with Postgres configuration/management, so I went with CockroachDB instead (which also forced me off a CPU core since I required more RAM). Here's to hoping that receiving access doesn't take too long ^_^
servercobra 8y ago
That's really exciting! DO is knocking it out the park lately as "AWS...but easy to use". I'd love to see Mongo as a managed DB.
- inscrutable 8y ago
  Mongo licensing prevents DO doing this themselves, although they could partner with them.
  - RSZC 8y ago
    Currently using Mongo Atlas free tier for a side project - it's been pretty wonderful so far
- sixdimensional 8y ago
  You can get something with a MongoDB API if you use Microsoft's CosmosDB, although it is very expensive and not actually Mongo underneath. But it has some pretty impressive technical specs too, especially geographically distributed multi-master writes and impressive response times. I don't work for MS and haven't used the Mongo API, just aware of it.
tnolet 8y ago
Just started using the new Kubernetes offering on Digital Ocean. Still in Beta but works pretty good. If this is a sign for how they will do databases, I'm all ears. Add CI/CD and you have a Heroku competitor.
- joering2 8y ago
  Glad you are having fun working on your after hours side project with DO. But please DO NOT host with DO if you plan to run a real production systems, build a company, hire people etc. I have never found a better company to spun off a server and play with some settings but when their algorithm decides there is something fishy, bye bye your account, servers, backups, you never going to see any of this ever again. The last startup I heavily pushed with switching to OVH or even Rackspace was exact sample of what happens when DO algorithm decides you are not genuine. That's it. No explanation, no phone number to call, nothing. These people blindly decided to believe their algorithm and never wanted even discuss resuming the account or even get us backup of data. There was nothing shady going on I assure you. Funny part is as of today DigitalOcean is still in violation of GPPR, as we have requested to hopefully find out what was wrong with our account by filing request for info. Nope, zit, nada, totally ignored. We have filed complain with proper authority and also notified Attorney General in NY and continue await result. Build all you want on DigitalOcean, but please understand not people but their weird algorithm is in charge of the future of your startup, future of your company and future salary or lack therefore when you are forced to fire team of people because you fall behind with payroll. In other words: be warned and build at your own risk.
  - whitepoplar 8y ago
    This is frightening. Can anyone from DO chime in?
    - raiyu 8y ago
      Just making sure to reply to each person that raised a concern. There is a lot of fraud that comes into every single cloud provider as root access to a virtual server can be used for a lot of malicious activity. As a result every cloud provider has automatic and manual processes that they run to find these accounts and flag them. In the case of DigitalOcean when an account is flagged it is locked, which simply prevents a user from creating more resources and an email notification goes out to the user to establish a line of communication. There is no service interruption, and certainly the account, it's droplets, and other resources are not deleted, and never deleted automatically when the account is initially flagged. There are numerous communications that go out even if a user is unresponsive.
chaostheory 8y ago
This was what held me back from using DO for all my projects. Happy it's here now.
inscrutable 8y ago
very interesting. With this and the new DO kubernetes offering (if both are reliable), DO could be a compelling option for postgres-based kubernetes clusters baseload - circa half the price of google cloud. All the other stuff you need like logs and monitoring can be installed with helm charts.
icpmacdo 8y ago
What is the cost?
brightball 8y ago
Sweet mother! #1 thing you can do to make this compete with RDS and Cloud SQL would be to support extensions out there that they don’t. HypoPG needed by Dexter, pg_partman, etc. Lack of certain extensions is the biggest failing of those offerings IMO.
- doh 8y ago
  I believe most of those are offered by Citus Cloud [0]. I know it's not the same, but you can spin just a single worker and essentially end with a faster PG than the vanilla PG. [0] https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud
  - brightball 8y ago
    Isn’t Citus AWS only right now though?
    - doh 8y ago
      Yes. I meant this more as a hosted solution in general.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    It starts at a minimum of 2 workers. And the pricing is steep too. The workers only operate on distributed tables so if you can't shard your data then you won't get any use out of those nodes, and sharding comes with its own problems. Citus isn't recommended unless you really need the size and want to stick with Postgres/OLTP.
    - doh 8y ago
      Didn't know it's 2. Pricing may be steeper in comparison, but it provides more than just a hosted PG. You are absolutely correct that you have to shard your data to take an advantage. It's not equal to vanilla PG. It's an alternative though.
St-Clock 8y ago
I wonder if this is a response to Amazon Lightsail[1] now offering managed database? [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-amazon-lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-a...
- coder543 8y ago
  Considering it was announced at least as far back as August[0], I highly doubt it. [0]: https://blog.digitalocean.com/2018-mid-year-product-update/ https://blog.digitalocean.com/2018-mid-year-product-update/ (look at the bottom of the article)
- thinkshiv 8y ago
  Hi there! I lead products at DO and we've had DBaaS on our roadmap for some time now.
  - Implicated 8y ago
    Any chance someone could fast-track an inclusion for me of both the k8s and managed db solutions? I'm leading a team that is _literally_ days away from provisioning a cluster for an existing production SaaS application that's currently on DO vm's. Would prefer to stay with DO.. My email is in profile - happy to answer any questions.
    - thinkshiv 8y ago
      hey there, shiv here from DO. I will get you in both programs asap.
    - phildougherty 8y ago
      Hey there! DO Kubernetes PM here. I just added you so you have access to the product. I will reach out to the PM on DBaaS as well.
      - Implicated 8y ago
        Thank you!
drej 8y ago
Excellent, I've just finished setting up a Postgres instance on a DO Droplet. I hope they still allow SSH into the instance, so that I can load data directly from there. By the way this comes just a week after AWS Lightsail started offering the same. Excellent stuff. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-amazon-lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-a...
l5870uoo9y 8y ago
Anybody hosting an online business on Digital Ocean (or similar VPS)? All companies I see all use Heruko, AWS or GCP.
- Scarbutt 8y ago
  No one, their earnings just appear magically out of the blue.
- mr_toad 8y ago
  Netcraft ranked them as the second largest web-facing hosting provider a couple of years back, and they seem to be growing rapidly. https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/05/01/digitalocean-becomes-the-second-largest-hosting-company-in-the-world.html https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/05/01/digitalocean-b... I suspect that DO is a factor in AWS introducing Lightsail.
- james33 8y ago
  We've been slowly moving from AWS to DO over the last 6 months due to cost, performance and ease of use. We haven't had any issues and the support has been far superior as well. We wrote up a benchmarking comparison with some reasoning behind the switch: https://goldfirestudios.com/blog/150/Benchmarking-AWS-DigitalOcean-Linode-Packet-and-Vultr https://goldfirestudios.com/blog/150/Benchmarking-AWS-Digita....
  - l5870uoo9y 8y ago
    Great read, thanks for sharing.
dylrich 8y ago
If anyone from DO is around - Will libprotobuf-c be available on managed postgres? I ask because for the longest time AWS RDS didn't support cutting Mapbox Vector Tiles from PostGIS.
- bk_avalara 8y ago
  We ran into this same problem. The RDS team fixed this earlier this month when they launched support for 10.5. It's buried in this blog post: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/10/rds-postgresql-supports-minor-versions/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/10/rds-postg...
tyingq 8y ago
So now they have managed databases, load balancers, a cloud firewall that's partially VPC like, object storage and block storage. Assuming managed K8S is next, or maybe more "AZ/Region" h/a features. Great to have a new player coming into this space. Especially one with reasonable egress charges.
- manigandham 8y ago
  They already have Kubernetes in preview: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/
- Ataraxy 8y ago
  One thing I imagine that's coming at some point is their own implementation of "cloud functions".
  - cristaloleg 8y ago
    Or logging, tracing, metrics
- devmunchies 8y ago
  I was thinking their next thing would be a FaaS offering.
no1youknowz 8y ago
Would be awesome if DO also included support for MemSQL. I know MemSQL back in 2017 announced managed services, but I'm pretty sure they closed it. Although I can't find a link.
- manigandham 8y ago
  MemSQL is a great product but it's a niche offering and requires proprietary licensing by capacity so it'll probably never be provided as a managed offering by anyone, especially by a smaller player like DO.
jason_slack 8y ago
I bet it is going to be very expensive. I have a 300gb MySQL database that needs a more reliable home. I add about 800mb if data a day.
- tracker1 8y ago
  DO's block storage is around $10:100GB though it probably won't have as flexible capacity planning for you, so you'll likely want to start around 2TB to account for 2+ years growth. note: I'm not affiliated with DO in any way and pricing and capacity are only speculation.
SnowingXIV 8y ago
This looks fantastic, Heroku definitely could use some competition. I love them but the only other option is using some insane AWS stuff with nonsensical icons and naming. Hope this takes off and adds a nice CI.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Insane? AWS RDS is rather self-contained and simple enough to get started with if you use the defaults. They also offer managed dbs as a simpler option with Lightsail: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ And there are tons of managed database hosting providers outside of Heroku.
pmiri 8y ago
This is the product that can finally get me to totally switch off of AWS. Droplets <- EC2 Spaces <- S3 Managed Databases <- RDS
- copperx 8y ago
  Is Spaces fully compatible with the S3 API, in your experience?
  - thinkshiv 8y ago
    yes it is
ngrilly 8y ago
Is there an expected downtime during system updates?
- tracker1 8y ago
  updates look like they are on-demand... you have to click to run db updates.
cowmix 8y ago
Postgresql first.. finally.. cool!
mtw 8y ago
Would be great to see a benchmark vs a database in a regular DigitalOcean droplet, or information about hardware. This information would be useful for projects requiring high performance per sec.
- tracker1 8y ago
  No details on pricing, but wouldn't be surprised to see the pricing close to matching a droplet, and deploying managed over existing infrastructure. There are of course tweaks I've seen for performance on existing clouds (raiding over block storage devices), tweaking swap space/usage, etc. Not sure how deep it'll go in the managed usage, but very happy to see it. The one piece I've really felt was deeply missing.
timmaah 8y ago
I see some DO employees around.. What is the trick for getting access to the new Kubernetes and/or postgres betas? I'd love to use both for my side hustle (Currently on normal DO droplets) EDIT - I now see the kubernetes option in my DO account. Thanks!
- jangerhofer 8y ago
  Where did you find the K8s listing? I'm in a similar boat!
  - timmaah 8y ago
    Someone must have toggled the k8s beta switch for me. It wasn't there earlier.
    - jangerhofer 8y ago
      Ah, right on -- thanks!
andyfleming 8y ago
I love that they are adding this. They are becoming a more and more viable solution for real production projects and their UX is top-notch, especially compared to the mess that is AWS and GCP.
DataInSolutions 8y ago
this is fantastic! I've got several droplets for smaller customers and it's always a pain to setup and manage a DB for them. I just hope it's not terribly expensive for the smallest tier.
aneesv 8y ago
Great to see DO adding managed db. Looking forward to see cloud functions.
the_cat_kittles 8y ago
this is a useful thing as i often did these by hand on DO before, and they are a bit of a pain. but if their pricing for volumes is any indication, these will be pretty expensive. curious what the price is going to be.
joshuatalb 8y ago
I’ve been hoping for this for a while. I’m eagerly awaiting access to their Kubernetes service, so this is a perfect compliment to the upcoming service releases. Also interesting timing too. Amazon Lightsail (the cheaper AWS alternative) is similarly priced to providers such as DigitalOcean, Linode, etc and released their managed database offering the other day: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-amazon-lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-a...
ljosa 8y ago
How is DigitalOcean's resilience to DDoS attacks? After Linode's giant DDoS-related outages a couple of years ago, I moved everything to AWS on the theory that they (along with Google and Azure) would be better at mitigating similar attacks. Would be nice to have DO as an option.
- Something1234 8y ago
  Wait I thought AWS made you pay if you got hit with a DDoS or even a moderate amount of traffic. It's just there is no cap on costs if you have any kind of autoscaling enabled. There use to be many posts complaining about surprise charges on AWS.
  - wild_preference 8y ago
    You basically politely ask AWS if they will refund you when you're DDoSed and hope the attack is apparent enough to pass their threshold. They were generous enough, but at the expense of uncertainty + you needing to play an active role in getting them to pay your bill. Depending on what sort of service you run, it may be a constant ordeal. After getting some large CloudFront bills taken care of, I left and wondered what sort of person had the stomach it.
  - ljosa 8y ago
    I'm not worried my own instance/droplet getting DDoSed, but DO's network being taken offline for days because of a large-scale DDoS attack directed at another customer, as happened with Linode in 2016.
KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
What are the chances of mongodb?
dhbradshaw 8y ago
Very interesting. I put up a few different sights on a droplet and have been preparing to make a switch over to Heroku exactly for the sake of the managed postgres. Maybe I won't have to!
jaequery 8y ago
This is a game changer. But just how much more reliable will this be compared to Amazon RDS?
ianwalter 8y ago
This is great but I wish they would give some more insight into the early access system. Ive been waiting for Kubernetes access for what seems like an eternity.
zafiro17 8y ago
I was looking for hosted PostgreSQL and eventually wound up at http://elephantsql.com http://elephantsql.com, with which I've been happy. I don't have a 'production' service in that I'm not relying on a DB to sell a service, like underpinning an app/website. But my DB is mission critical for knowledge management for my business, and I don't trust myself to manage the server properly. Nice to see competition in this space, and DO is a good one to be offering hosted databases - I'm happy with their other services too.
thakobyan 8y ago
Would love to get an early access to DO k8s!
franciscop 8y ago
This is a huge deal for me personally, and probably the main and only reason why I haven't used Digital Ocean for real yet. Let's see how the pricing goes, since having many small projects each one with very little requirements normally means paying a lot of $.
ksec 8y ago
I think that is the final major puzzle to going All in on DO, hopefully it would not be built on top of their current Droplet config but much more customised for DB's need. On the Subject of DO, I am wondering am I the only one who felt the need of 1vCPU to 1GB RAM droplet? Given the vCPU aren't even core but thread. Now that Managed DB is in place that is even more need for frameworks like Rails, my guess for other framework would need even less memory per process / Thread. I was hoping AMD EPYC will make that happen, but so far nothing has happened yet on all other VM hosting providers. May be EPYC 2. And if DO will someday provide an CDN, or reselling of CDN through partnership.( Although BunnyCDN seems to be working great for me at the moment.)
duboff 8y ago
Would love a chance to test this and the k8s service out. My email is mikhail at chattermill dot io
nojvek 8y ago
I’ve loved the simplicity and speed of DO. DO has definitely a lot to offer via some simple cloudy things as 1) Good ol VMS and load balancers - they already do 2) Managed K8s - may be they already do? I dunno 3) Managed DBs - good to see this. 4) Big fat blob store (like s3) - not sure. CDN that operates over blob store would be nice too. With this pieces, one can develop quite a significantly complex and scalable application without worrying about infra. AWS, Azure, GCP are wayyy too complicated. There’s definitely a niche for an IAAS Company to only do the few important things and do them better (speed, reliability, price) than the big 3 and steal a meaningful chunk of the market.
galby 8y ago
Caught this late this morning - any DO employees still here? I'm signed up for the k8 & postgres betas but haven't had any luck getting k8 opened up. Would LOVE to participate in the postgres managed beta - definitely trying to move off from AWS for this. bryan at priceflow.com

337 points by JonoBB 8y ago

Wow, this is fantastic news! I think this opens the floodgates for lots of people who currently use Heroku, and would like to use simple VPS's without jumping into the headache that is AWS. Any word on pricing?

jkchu 8y ago
What are your objections/concerns against using AWS? I have used it both for work and in personal projects and haven't ran into any issues/headaches.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  Personally, I find AWS's pricing complicated, and there are so many different services that it's confusing. I think it's mostly a UX issue, but it's really overwhelming. DO, Lonnie Linode, and Vultr are very simple, so that's what I use. Perhaps if I start needing more from my hosting I'll look at AWS, but it's just not worth my time to figure it out for the scale of projects I'm doing.
- whitepoplar 8y ago
  AWS just seems too complicated to me. I like to spin up simple VMs (with local storage) without any surprises.
- qaq 8y ago
  For one thing you have no fixed monthly cost on AWS

nbst 8y ago

Holy crap, the fact this was missing is really the only reason I use Google Cloud for my projects.

bovermyer 8y ago

This is good news. I look forward to seeing the managed MySQL option.

thinkshiv 8y ago
yes, it's next on our roadmap of engines. I work at DO FYI.

teilo 8y ago

It's nice that we are finally at a point where PG is the first offering, instead of the "Coming Soon."

teknico 8y ago
It is nice indeed. Also, PostgreSQL is described as powerful, reliable, full-featured, and fast, while MySQL as the most popular: that's all. What is not said can be as important as what is.

nerdywordy 8y ago

I for one have always liked the simplicity of DO for hosting but I've never wanted to take on the full liability of self-rolling a DB server (and backups and replicas). So everything my company has I've put on heroku or azure. This has potential to be really significant as I'd wager there are a lot of folks in similar situations.

sdegutis 8y ago
If you have a relatively small set of users, setting up your own database is usually as simple as setting it up locally and you won't need shards or anything. And setting up backups is as simple as adding a cron job that calls your backup shell script, which you can test separately. And by "small set of users", consider what SQLite's own website[1] says: Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic. If SQLite is able to comfortably handle 100k hits/day, I imagine that more "legitimate" databases can handle more traffic comfortably without needing to jump to scale horizontally. [1] https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html under "Websites" section
- whitepoplar 8y ago
  The real benefit to having someone else manage your DB is that it eliminates the "unknown unknowns." I don't want to spend the requisite time becoming an expert DB sysadmin--I'd rather let someone else do it so that I can sleep at night. Also, databases are in a different category of risk. Misconfigure an nginx config? No big deal, fix it and move on. Set up your database incorrectly, resulting in data loss down the road? Could be game over.
- Scarbutt 8y ago
  Agree sqlite is great and >80% of websites will probably run fine on it, but 100K hits/day is pretty vague, does that mean 1 hit/sec or 3 hits/sec during peak time, etc...?

jagger27 8y ago

Well that news just made feel great about picking Postgres for my current SaaS project. Definitely going to be migrating over once I get access! I wonder how long they've been working on this.

thinkshiv 8y ago
We've been working on this for some time. We announced earlier in the year that we want to offer this type of a managed service and we will start with one engine for now. Disclosure: I lead Products at DigitalOcean.

tumblen 8y ago

Thinking about moving from Linode to DO just for this. Makes so much sense. Would be great to have something similar for Redis.

bonsai80 8y ago

I don't see any mention of the cost. Is that listed somewhere?

strig 8y ago
I'm guessing it will just be the cost of the droplet that it's installed on.
- michaelcampbell 8y ago
  Sadly (as DO explained, perhaps after you posted), no.
thinkshiv 8y ago
Hi there, this is Shiv - I am the VP of Product at DigitalOcean. Thanks for asking about pricing. We are still working out the pricing details. I can tell you it won't be just the cost of the Droplet because this is a managed service with lots of additional features that you would not get with the current Droplet product.
- wjdp 8y ago
  This is something that has put me off services like this for personal / open source projects. I'm time and cost limited and usage will be minimal so both the expense of a managed service and the time cost of setting up my own are both unattractive. Would DO be open to a limited 'hobby tier' for this set at the price of the droplet?
- apapli 8y ago
  If you can offer some sort of “hobby” plan with a limited I/O and DB size that would be great for hobby projects like what I build. I’ve used RDS before and it is great, but the cost is a bit eye watering when we are talking about less than one user every 10 minutes. I’ve found Jaws DB works well for my needs (and pricing), but given they are layered on AWS it does feel like I’m still a bit limited - ie it would be good to still access the DB server so I can spin up multiple DBs (pre-prod, production etc), despite my usage being minimal. If DO can hit a sub $10pm price point (even with severely restricted performance) that would be awesome!

thegeekpirate 8y ago

This is fantastic timing—I didn't feel like dealing with Postgres configuration/management, so I went with CockroachDB instead (which also forced me off a CPU core since I required more RAM). Here's to hoping that receiving access doesn't take too long ^_^

servercobra 8y ago

That's really exciting! DO is knocking it out the park lately as "AWS...but easy to use". I'd love to see Mongo as a managed DB.

inscrutable 8y ago
Mongo licensing prevents DO doing this themselves, although they could partner with them.
- RSZC 8y ago
  Currently using Mongo Atlas free tier for a side project - it's been pretty wonderful so far
sixdimensional 8y ago
You can get something with a MongoDB API if you use Microsoft's CosmosDB, although it is very expensive and not actually Mongo underneath. But it has some pretty impressive technical specs too, especially geographically distributed multi-master writes and impressive response times. I don't work for MS and haven't used the Mongo API, just aware of it.

tnolet 8y ago

Just started using the new Kubernetes offering on Digital Ocean. Still in Beta but works pretty good. If this is a sign for how they will do databases, I'm all ears. Add CI/CD and you have a Heroku competitor.

joering2 8y ago
Glad you are having fun working on your after hours side project with DO. But please DO NOT host with DO if you plan to run a real production systems, build a company, hire people etc. I have never found a better company to spun off a server and play with some settings but when their algorithm decides there is something fishy, bye bye your account, servers, backups, you never going to see any of this ever again. The last startup I heavily pushed with switching to OVH or even Rackspace was exact sample of what happens when DO algorithm decides you are not genuine. That's it. No explanation, no phone number to call, nothing. These people blindly decided to believe their algorithm and never wanted even discuss resuming the account or even get us backup of data. There was nothing shady going on I assure you. Funny part is as of today DigitalOcean is still in violation of GPPR, as we have requested to hopefully find out what was wrong with our account by filing request for info. Nope, zit, nada, totally ignored. We have filed complain with proper authority and also notified Attorney General in NY and continue await result. Build all you want on DigitalOcean, but please understand not people but their weird algorithm is in charge of the future of your startup, future of your company and future salary or lack therefore when you are forced to fire team of people because you fall behind with payroll. In other words: be warned and build at your own risk.
- whitepoplar 8y ago
  This is frightening. Can anyone from DO chime in?
  - raiyu 8y ago
    Just making sure to reply to each person that raised a concern. There is a lot of fraud that comes into every single cloud provider as root access to a virtual server can be used for a lot of malicious activity. As a result every cloud provider has automatic and manual processes that they run to find these accounts and flag them. In the case of DigitalOcean when an account is flagged it is locked, which simply prevents a user from creating more resources and an email notification goes out to the user to establish a line of communication. There is no service interruption, and certainly the account, it's droplets, and other resources are not deleted, and never deleted automatically when the account is initially flagged. There are numerous communications that go out even if a user is unresponsive.

chaostheory 8y ago

This was what held me back from using DO for all my projects. Happy it's here now.

inscrutable 8y ago

very interesting. With this and the new DO kubernetes offering (if both are reliable), DO could be a compelling option for postgres-based kubernetes clusters baseload - circa half the price of google cloud. All the other stuff you need like logs and monitoring can be installed with helm charts.

icpmacdo 8y ago

What is the cost?

brightball 8y ago

Sweet mother! #1 thing you can do to make this compete with RDS and Cloud SQL would be to support extensions out there that they don’t. HypoPG needed by Dexter, pg_partman, etc. Lack of certain extensions is the biggest failing of those offerings IMO.

doh 8y ago
I believe most of those are offered by Citus Cloud [0]. I know it's not the same, but you can spin just a single worker and essentially end with a faster PG than the vanilla PG. [0] https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud
- brightball 8y ago
  Isn’t Citus AWS only right now though?
  - doh 8y ago
    Yes. I meant this more as a hosted solution in general.
- manigandham 8y ago
  It starts at a minimum of 2 workers. And the pricing is steep too. The workers only operate on distributed tables so if you can't shard your data then you won't get any use out of those nodes, and sharding comes with its own problems. Citus isn't recommended unless you really need the size and want to stick with Postgres/OLTP.
  - doh 8y ago
    Didn't know it's 2. Pricing may be steeper in comparison, but it provides more than just a hosted PG. You are absolutely correct that you have to shard your data to take an advantage. It's not equal to vanilla PG. It's an alternative though.

St-Clock 8y ago

I wonder if this is a response to Amazon Lightsail[1] now offering managed database? [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-amazon-lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-a...

coder543 8y ago
Considering it was announced at least as far back as August[0], I highly doubt it. [0]: https://blog.digitalocean.com/2018-mid-year-product-update/ https://blog.digitalocean.com/2018-mid-year-product-update/ (look at the bottom of the article)
thinkshiv 8y ago
Hi there! I lead products at DO and we've had DBaaS on our roadmap for some time now.
- Implicated 8y ago
  Any chance someone could fast-track an inclusion for me of both the k8s and managed db solutions? I'm leading a team that is _literally_ days away from provisioning a cluster for an existing production SaaS application that's currently on DO vm's. Would prefer to stay with DO.. My email is in profile - happy to answer any questions.
  - thinkshiv 8y ago
    hey there, shiv here from DO. I will get you in both programs asap.
  - phildougherty 8y ago
    Hey there! DO Kubernetes PM here. I just added you so you have access to the product. I will reach out to the PM on DBaaS as well.
    - Implicated 8y ago
      Thank you!

drej 8y ago

Excellent, I've just finished setting up a Postgres instance on a DO Droplet. I hope they still allow SSH into the instance, so that I can load data directly from there. By the way this comes just a week after AWS Lightsail started offering the same. Excellent stuff. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-amazon-lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-a...

l5870uoo9y 8y ago

Anybody hosting an online business on Digital Ocean (or similar VPS)? All companies I see all use Heruko, AWS or GCP.

Scarbutt 8y ago
No one, their earnings just appear magically out of the blue.
mr_toad 8y ago
Netcraft ranked them as the second largest web-facing hosting provider a couple of years back, and they seem to be growing rapidly. https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/05/01/digitalocean-becomes-the-second-largest-hosting-company-in-the-world.html https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/05/01/digitalocean-b... I suspect that DO is a factor in AWS introducing Lightsail.
james33 8y ago
We've been slowly moving from AWS to DO over the last 6 months due to cost, performance and ease of use. We haven't had any issues and the support has been far superior as well. We wrote up a benchmarking comparison with some reasoning behind the switch: https://goldfirestudios.com/blog/150/Benchmarking-AWS-DigitalOcean-Linode-Packet-and-Vultr https://goldfirestudios.com/blog/150/Benchmarking-AWS-Digita....
- l5870uoo9y 8y ago
  Great read, thanks for sharing.

dylrich 8y ago

If anyone from DO is around - Will libprotobuf-c be available on managed postgres? I ask because for the longest time AWS RDS didn't support cutting Mapbox Vector Tiles from PostGIS.

bk_avalara 8y ago
We ran into this same problem. The RDS team fixed this earlier this month when they launched support for 10.5. It's buried in this blog post: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/10/rds-postgresql-supports-minor-versions/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/10/rds-postg...

tyingq 8y ago

So now they have managed databases, load balancers, a cloud firewall that's partially VPC like, object storage and block storage. Assuming managed K8S is next, or maybe more "AZ/Region" h/a features. Great to have a new player coming into this space. Especially one with reasonable egress charges.

manigandham 8y ago
They already have Kubernetes in preview: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/
Ataraxy 8y ago
One thing I imagine that's coming at some point is their own implementation of "cloud functions".
- cristaloleg 8y ago
  Or logging, tracing, metrics
devmunchies 8y ago
I was thinking their next thing would be a FaaS offering.

no1youknowz 8y ago

Would be awesome if DO also included support for MemSQL. I know MemSQL back in 2017 announced managed services, but I'm pretty sure they closed it. Although I can't find a link.

manigandham 8y ago
MemSQL is a great product but it's a niche offering and requires proprietary licensing by capacity so it'll probably never be provided as a managed offering by anyone, especially by a smaller player like DO.

jason_slack 8y ago

I bet it is going to be very expensive. I have a 300gb MySQL database that needs a more reliable home. I add about 800mb if data a day.

tracker1 8y ago
DO's block storage is around $10:100GB though it probably won't have as flexible capacity planning for you, so you'll likely want to start around 2TB to account for 2+ years growth. note: I'm not affiliated with DO in any way and pricing and capacity are only speculation.

SnowingXIV 8y ago

This looks fantastic, Heroku definitely could use some competition. I love them but the only other option is using some insane AWS stuff with nonsensical icons and naming. Hope this takes off and adds a nice CI.

manigandham 8y ago
Insane? AWS RDS is rather self-contained and simple enough to get started with if you use the defaults. They also offer managed dbs as a simpler option with Lightsail: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ And there are tons of managed database hosting providers outside of Heroku.

pmiri 8y ago

This is the product that can finally get me to totally switch off of AWS. Droplets <- EC2 Spaces <- S3 Managed Databases <- RDS

copperx 8y ago
Is Spaces fully compatible with the S3 API, in your experience?
- thinkshiv 8y ago
  yes it is

ngrilly 8y ago

Is there an expected downtime during system updates?

tracker1 8y ago
updates look like they are on-demand... you have to click to run db updates.

cowmix 8y ago

Postgresql first.. finally.. cool!

mtw 8y ago

Would be great to see a benchmark vs a database in a regular DigitalOcean droplet, or information about hardware. This information would be useful for projects requiring high performance per sec.

tracker1 8y ago
No details on pricing, but wouldn't be surprised to see the pricing close to matching a droplet, and deploying managed over existing infrastructure. There are of course tweaks I've seen for performance on existing clouds (raiding over block storage devices), tweaking swap space/usage, etc. Not sure how deep it'll go in the managed usage, but very happy to see it. The one piece I've really felt was deeply missing.

timmaah 8y ago

I see some DO employees around.. What is the trick for getting access to the new Kubernetes and/or postgres betas? I'd love to use both for my side hustle (Currently on normal DO droplets) EDIT - I now see the kubernetes option in my DO account. Thanks!

jangerhofer 8y ago
Where did you find the K8s listing? I'm in a similar boat!
- timmaah 8y ago
  Someone must have toggled the k8s beta switch for me. It wasn't there earlier.
  - jangerhofer 8y ago
    Ah, right on -- thanks!

andyfleming 8y ago

I love that they are adding this. They are becoming a more and more viable solution for real production projects and their UX is top-notch, especially compared to the mess that is AWS and GCP.

DataInSolutions 8y ago

this is fantastic! I've got several droplets for smaller customers and it's always a pain to setup and manage a DB for them. I just hope it's not terribly expensive for the smallest tier.

aneesv 8y ago

Great to see DO adding managed db. Looking forward to see cloud functions.

the_cat_kittles 8y ago

this is a useful thing as i often did these by hand on DO before, and they are a bit of a pain. but if their pricing for volumes is any indication, these will be pretty expensive. curious what the price is going to be.

joshuatalb 8y ago

I’ve been hoping for this for a while. I’m eagerly awaiting access to their Kubernetes service, so this is a perfect compliment to the upcoming service releases. Also interesting timing too. Amazon Lightsail (the cheaper AWS alternative) is similarly priced to providers such as DigitalOcean, Linode, etc and released their managed database offering the other day: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-amazon-lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-a...

ljosa 8y ago

How is DigitalOcean's resilience to DDoS attacks? After Linode's giant DDoS-related outages a couple of years ago, I moved everything to AWS on the theory that they (along with Google and Azure) would be better at mitigating similar attacks. Would be nice to have DO as an option.

Something1234 8y ago
Wait I thought AWS made you pay if you got hit with a DDoS or even a moderate amount of traffic. It's just there is no cap on costs if you have any kind of autoscaling enabled. There use to be many posts complaining about surprise charges on AWS.
- wild_preference 8y ago
  You basically politely ask AWS if they will refund you when you're DDoSed and hope the attack is apparent enough to pass their threshold. They were generous enough, but at the expense of uncertainty + you needing to play an active role in getting them to pay your bill. Depending on what sort of service you run, it may be a constant ordeal. After getting some large CloudFront bills taken care of, I left and wondered what sort of person had the stomach it.
- ljosa 8y ago
  I'm not worried my own instance/droplet getting DDoSed, but DO's network being taken offline for days because of a large-scale DDoS attack directed at another customer, as happened with Linode in 2016.

KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago

What are the chances of mongodb?

dhbradshaw 8y ago

Very interesting. I put up a few different sights on a droplet and have been preparing to make a switch over to Heroku exactly for the sake of the managed postgres. Maybe I won't have to!

jaequery 8y ago

This is a game changer. But just how much more reliable will this be compared to Amazon RDS?

ianwalter 8y ago

This is great but I wish they would give some more insight into the early access system. Ive been waiting for Kubernetes access for what seems like an eternity.

zafiro17 8y ago

I was looking for hosted PostgreSQL and eventually wound up at http://elephantsql.com http://elephantsql.com, with which I've been happy. I don't have a 'production' service in that I'm not relying on a DB to sell a service, like underpinning an app/website. But my DB is mission critical for knowledge management for my business, and I don't trust myself to manage the server properly. Nice to see competition in this space, and DO is a good one to be offering hosted databases - I'm happy with their other services too.

thakobyan 8y ago

Would love to get an early access to DO k8s!

franciscop 8y ago

This is a huge deal for me personally, and probably the main and only reason why I haven't used Digital Ocean for real yet. Let's see how the pricing goes, since having many small projects each one with very little requirements normally means paying a lot of $.

ksec 8y ago

I think that is the final major puzzle to going All in on DO, hopefully it would not be built on top of their current Droplet config but much more customised for DB's need. On the Subject of DO, I am wondering am I the only one who felt the need of 1vCPU to 1GB RAM droplet? Given the vCPU aren't even core but thread. Now that Managed DB is in place that is even more need for frameworks like Rails, my guess for other framework would need even less memory per process / Thread. I was hoping AMD EPYC will make that happen, but so far nothing has happened yet on all other VM hosting providers. May be EPYC 2. And if DO will someday provide an CDN, or reselling of CDN through partnership.( Although BunnyCDN seems to be working great for me at the moment.)

duboff 8y ago

Would love a chance to test this and the k8s service out. My email is mikhail at chattermill dot io

nojvek 8y ago

I’ve loved the simplicity and speed of DO. DO has definitely a lot to offer via some simple cloudy things as 1) Good ol VMS and load balancers - they already do 2) Managed K8s - may be they already do? I dunno 3) Managed DBs - good to see this. 4) Big fat blob store (like s3) - not sure. CDN that operates over blob store would be nice too. With this pieces, one can develop quite a significantly complex and scalable application without worrying about infra. AWS, Azure, GCP are wayyy too complicated. There’s definitely a niche for an IAAS Company to only do the few important things and do them better (speed, reliability, price) than the big 3 and steal a meaningful chunk of the market.

galby 8y ago

Caught this late this morning - any DO employees still here? I'm signed up for the k8 & postgres betas but haven't had any luck getting k8 opened up. Would LOVE to participate in the postgres managed beta - definitely trying to move off from AWS for this. bryan at priceflow.com