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This reads like a Postgres vs DynamoDB comparison, because that’s likely what it is. The article makes a lot of points really well, and if I had 8 highly quali

This reads like a Postgres vs DynamoDB comparison, because that’s likely what it is. The article makes a lot of points really well, and if I had 8 highly qualified people who had nothing else to do on my team working for free (or on salaries that were a rounding error in my actual and opportunity cost budget), I’d certainly get them to learn and use Timescale. But I don’t right now, so I’m going to use the option that gives me a time series DB with three or four clicks, gets the job done, and charges me for deployment and maintenance amortised across thousands of other customers. Having these arguments purely on cost of service terms is a very slippery slope. Yes, it’s less dollars paid in hardware if I put my life on hold and learn how to configure this. Or pay someone else to do it. Yes, it’s cheaper if I order parts on newegg, build a server, drive to a colo and install it in the rack, and then drive there again each time something breaks. And yes, it’s even cheaper if I run it off a Raspberry Pi duct taped under my desk. No one is disputing these things. AWS and other cloud providers sell peace of mind, acquisition and procurement speed, professional maintenance and remediation, deep integration, faster development and testing, and infrastructure management - with servers thrown in for free. Timescale sells time series database software. This is not a valid comparison.

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mfreed 6y ago
1. Timescale sells a fully managed service offering running on AWS, GCP, or Azure. So you can get started with 3-4 clicks and have a database running in 30 seconds. (We actually don't sell "software" at all - that's all free to download and run yourself.) We're fully aligned that cloud services often have lower TCO in the long run =) https://www.timescale.com/timescale-signup https://www.timescale.com/timescale-signup 2. Beyond operations, your team probably already knows how to use much of TimescaleDB, if they know SQL and PostgreSQL. AWS Timestream, on the other hand, introduces a bunch more of strange gotcha's, as evidenced in the blog post (even from the weird SQL hoops that you need to jump through.)
- sudhirj 6y ago
  The managed cloud feature is great, so if there's a comparison happening it'll be much more valid if you do a like-to-like one. I'd be more interested to see that the numbers (performance and cost would be) if you ran the comparison with Timescale Cloud managed, on AWS, with EBS set up (and note IOPS settings) at a comparable provisioned size with multi-AZ failover. Doing that and checking costs would be much fairer from a cost-per-metric point of view.
  - mfreed 6y ago
    We report numbers in the blog post with our managed offering Timescale Forge, running on AWS with storage replicated across AZs and supporting automated failover. Not sure about "comparably provisioned re: IOPS" given that you don't know about that at all with AWS Timestream, but our blog post reports the performance/cost of a suitably provisioned Timescale Forge instance (8vCPU / 1TB storage). 100GB ingest then query benchmarks took far less than 1 hour with Timescale Forge @ $2.18/hour. The "consumption based pricing" for AWS Timestream for same benchmark took $336.40.

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mfreed 6y ago

1. Timescale sells a fully managed service offering running on AWS, GCP, or Azure. So you can get started with 3-4 clicks and have a database running in 30 seconds. (We actually don't sell "software" at all - that's all free to download and run yourself.) We're fully aligned that cloud services often have lower TCO in the long run =) https://www.timescale.com/timescale-signup https://www.timescale.com/timescale-signup 2. Beyond operations, your team probably already knows how to use much of TimescaleDB, if they know SQL and PostgreSQL. AWS Timestream, on the other hand, introduces a bunch more of strange gotcha's, as evidenced in the blog post (even from the weird SQL hoops that you need to jump through.)

sudhirj 6y ago
The managed cloud feature is great, so if there's a comparison happening it'll be much more valid if you do a like-to-like one. I'd be more interested to see that the numbers (performance and cost would be) if you ran the comparison with Timescale Cloud managed, on AWS, with EBS set up (and note IOPS settings) at a comparable provisioned size with multi-AZ failover. Doing that and checking costs would be much fairer from a cost-per-metric point of view.
- mfreed 6y ago
  We report numbers in the blog post with our managed offering Timescale Forge, running on AWS with storage replicated across AZs and supporting automated failover. Not sure about "comparably provisioned re: IOPS" given that you don't know about that at all with AWS Timestream, but our blog post reports the performance/cost of a suitably provisioned Timescale Forge instance (8vCPU / 1TB storage). 100GB ingest then query benchmarks took far less than 1 hour with Timescale Forge @ $2.18/hour. The "consumption based pricing" for AWS Timestream for same benchmark took $336.40.