7 ms·

Heroku Postgres: SQL Database-as-a-Service

112 points by tilt 15y ago

esja 15y ago
Cheapest plan: $200/month. That seems a bit high... what competes with this?
- bdotdub 15y ago
  When you think about all the setup, SysAdmin stuff, backups, scaling, etc you'll avoid, $200 a month ($2.4k) is pretty cheap to be able to just switch a scalable db on at a moments notice.
  - jbigelow76 15y ago
    $200 is cheap but I'm hoping they eventually put out an option closer to the $40/mo price point just so I can play around with Postgre (I'm currently a MS SQLServer guy that wants to start branching out). I don't want to spin up a new AWS and waste time with configuration and other things and don't want to worry about hosing a currently running instance just to have a new sandbox to play in. I'd pay a reasonable amount to have something akin to a cheap "test" instance in exchange for giving up things like an SLA or dedicated support.
    - einhverfr 15y ago
      If you want to just play around with it, why not download and install it? No charge for that.....
    - rmgraham 15y ago
      Their shared DB hosting is free or 5MB and $15/mo for 20GB. It's not going to have all fancy features of the dedicated (fork, follow, etc) but it is Postgres at least.
- salsakran 15y ago
  http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ I believe Heroku used EC2 under the hood before the Salesforce acquisition. Whether postgres (vs MySQL), the polish and better ui/workflow of heroku is worth the premium over RDS depends on you.
  - mcs 15y ago
    Heroku dynos are still ran on EC2 instances, exclusively on the East coast of the US. I'm not sure if these postgres servers are. However one interesting note is that the "maximum database size" of the heroku server is 2TB, while RDS is 1TB.
- absconditus 15y ago
  Seems high compared to what?
  - jhaile 15y ago
    Seems high compared to the cost of a comparable EC2 node. Of course - you avoid the administrative costs. But it's pretty expensive for an early-stage startup. Possibly a good deal for a larger company, but at that point you might prefer to just configure the EC2 nodes, backups, etc. yourself and save a good bit of $ every month.
    - thibaut_barrere 15y ago
      On the other hand, $200 is a common price for two hours of Rails consulting these days. So as a developer bootstrapping a product, I'd rather pay for this and sleep well (one of their bullet point). I'd be curious to know how reliable it is in practice, compared to a home-grown EC2 setup.
      - jhaile 15y ago
        Plus if you need a larger instance like a 7.5GB RAM instance, it's $800/month on Heroku vs $75/month for a reserved EC2 instance with comparable RAM. That's an astounding difference in price for cloud storage! Of course, the real competition is other data-storage services like Amazon RDS, MongoHQ, MongoLab, etc. (all much cheaper) (OK, so I excluded EBS costs from my EC2 comparison above but at $0.10/GB-month it's still going to be a huge difference for most cases)
        omfg 15y ago
        Your numbers are a bit off. It's more like 162 bucks a month for a comparable reserved EC2 instance. And 208 a month for a comparable reserved RDS instance. And that's of course with a 12 month commitment. You can't really compare EC2 to an offering like this because you're paying for the amount of time / labor costs it frees up. And of course RDS doesn't support Postgres so there's not a lot of competition at the moment.
- thibaut_barrere 15y ago
  It's some money but I'm definitely interested. Scroll down and you see some interesting things: - fork of databases (looks great to try out migrations easily) - read-only asynchronous replicas - connection from EC2 or elsewhere - health checks and "continuous protection" Looks fairly solid at first sight.
- 1gor 15y ago
  what competes with this? http://xeround.com http://xeround.com is a separate DB service, also heroku plugin. It is MySql-compatible, apparently they've wrote a custom distributed engine. Its is located on AWS or rackspace, so latency is quite low. Since xeround is pay-as-you go, if your initial DB requirements are low, you can run it on something like http://fluxflex.com http://fluxflex.com (which heroku-like PaaS, also AWS-based) and have 10 db-backed apps for something like $3 per month that will scale up when needed.
modoc 15y ago
I've seen a lot of "Cloud" database services lately, and while I love the general idea, from what I've seen in real life, for any serious db use, the impact of network latency is a HUGE problem. So unless this service happens to be residing in the same data center as your application it doesn't seem like a viable option. The difference between a local DB with <2 ms latency to a remote DB with ~50 ms latency is huge. I've seen application start times go from 1-2 minutes to 20-30 minutes by pointing at a remote DB. So if your app is even somewhat DB intensive, you really need <2 ms latency to your DB, and if it's not DB intensive, you probably don't need all the scaling and other infrastructure strengths these services bring to the table.
- michaelbuckbee 15y ago
  I think you are correct. I'd guess that the major target of this would be applications already running on AWS (which would put them mostly in the same datacenter). Obviously, a bunch of caveats about availability zones, etc.
- joshu 15y ago
  I think this is enormously exacerbated by roundtripping. Even if it's just 2ms away, and you go back and forth a few dozen times, you are doing a ton of waiting. This is one of the problem with joinless NoSQL databases, as well, since you HAVE to roundtrip to join.
  - randomdata 15y ago
    You don't have to. For instance, in CouchDB, you can use view collation to retrieve related documents in a single request.
    - joshu 15y ago
      That sounds like a join by another name :)
      - randomdata 15y ago
jaylevitt 15y ago
I wonder if they have any "special sauce" in running PostgreSQL on EC2, or if the real value is in the easy provisioning? We're running PG 9.0 on EC2 now via EBS, and everything I've read says it's tough to get it performant - even with large volumes and RAID 10, you still get spikes when your virtualization neighbors slam the disk.
- notaddicted 15y ago
  Considering their "Continuous Protection" feature, could they be streaming a write log out to S3? I think that way they could use the backup as the sole guarantee of durability, and use instance storage for the database. EDIT: also, I'm not sure if this is generally known elsewhere, but might they not be on ec2, they are advertising 1.7 GB cache, which is the same as a small instance, except without any room for the operating system or postgres itself.
  - imbriaco 15y ago
    You're exactly right about log streaming to S3. We open sourced the tool that we use to perform that: https://github.com/heroku/wal-e https://github.com/heroku/wal-e
    - bdonlan 15y ago
      S3 doesn't support continual logging - you need to decide on a file size up-front. Are you creating a new object for each log entry, or is there a window in which commits can be lost before the log gets flushed out, or do you have some other workaround...?
      - joevandyk 15y ago
        There's a window of a couple minutes in which data could be lost (in the worst case scenario).
        sector 15y ago
mark_l_watson 15y ago
I wish that they also sold their minimal shared 20GB $15/month database plan as a separate service (i.e., being able to access it from your own EC2 instances and not just from Heroku deployed apps). I have a use case for a low volume app that I would like to host on Heroku, but have other software also have access to the database, without resorting to the obvious workarounds.
sjs382 15y ago
I think this is amazing, and immediately had a project in mind for this. But then, I looked at their pricing: $200/mo at the lowest price point. It's still incredibly affordable, but not for what I had in mind. I wish they had lower levels so I could play.
- Anjin 15y ago
  I'm guessing that they will shortly as it seems like it is a big market hole to plug. I'd bet that since the lowest priced dedicated DB for a heroku app is $200, they've just moved that functionality over. There's probably some complexity in getting shared cheaper DBs available that we don't know about.
jtchang 15y ago
I don't know about you guys but one of the cheapest optimizations you can do is making sure your database and application server are "close" to each other. Does a cloud database service make sense? Maybe. Databases have gotten easier and easier to setup. In addition they are quite optimized in terms of processing power. I'm not sure I want to give up control my database just yet.
KaiX 15y ago
why is PostgreSQL instead of MySQL? What are the advantages of Postgres over MySQL in DBaaS implementation? I've seen some Database-as-a-service projects and all of them chooses PostgreSQL.
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  licensing might be an issue.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  Probably because for the sorts of applications dbaas implementations target, PostgreSQL dominates the market among open source solutions. MySQL is very popular on the web site, but as a database serving multiple applications from the same db, PostgreSQL has been the de facto choice in the open source world since I have been working with db's (at least the last 12 years).
tlogan 15y ago
Hmm.. It seems expensive. For this price I would chose Oracle Database RDS. Small Oracle DB instance is ~120/month on AWS.
CarlHoerberg 15y ago
Disclaimer: I own Cloud Postgres Soon to be released: https://www.cloudpostgres.com/ https://www.cloudpostgres.com/ Lower prices PostgreSQL 9.1 Optional PGPool in front of the replicas for load balancing Multiple datacenters

112 points by tilt 15y ago

esja 15y ago

Cheapest plan: $200/month. That seems a bit high... what competes with this?

bdotdub 15y ago
When you think about all the setup, SysAdmin stuff, backups, scaling, etc you'll avoid, $200 a month ($2.4k) is pretty cheap to be able to just switch a scalable db on at a moments notice.
- jbigelow76 15y ago
  $200 is cheap but I'm hoping they eventually put out an option closer to the $40/mo price point just so I can play around with Postgre (I'm currently a MS SQLServer guy that wants to start branching out). I don't want to spin up a new AWS and waste time with configuration and other things and don't want to worry about hosing a currently running instance just to have a new sandbox to play in. I'd pay a reasonable amount to have something akin to a cheap "test" instance in exchange for giving up things like an SLA or dedicated support.
  - einhverfr 15y ago
    If you want to just play around with it, why not download and install it? No charge for that.....
  - rmgraham 15y ago
    Their shared DB hosting is free or 5MB and $15/mo for 20GB. It's not going to have all fancy features of the dedicated (fork, follow, etc) but it is Postgres at least.
salsakran 15y ago
http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ I believe Heroku used EC2 under the hood before the Salesforce acquisition. Whether postgres (vs MySQL), the polish and better ui/workflow of heroku is worth the premium over RDS depends on you.
- mcs 15y ago
  Heroku dynos are still ran on EC2 instances, exclusively on the East coast of the US. I'm not sure if these postgres servers are. However one interesting note is that the "maximum database size" of the heroku server is 2TB, while RDS is 1TB.
absconditus 15y ago
Seems high compared to what?
- jhaile 15y ago
  Seems high compared to the cost of a comparable EC2 node. Of course - you avoid the administrative costs. But it's pretty expensive for an early-stage startup. Possibly a good deal for a larger company, but at that point you might prefer to just configure the EC2 nodes, backups, etc. yourself and save a good bit of $ every month.
  - thibaut_barrere 15y ago
    On the other hand, $200 is a common price for two hours of Rails consulting these days. So as a developer bootstrapping a product, I'd rather pay for this and sleep well (one of their bullet point). I'd be curious to know how reliable it is in practice, compared to a home-grown EC2 setup.
    - jhaile 15y ago
      Plus if you need a larger instance like a 7.5GB RAM instance, it's $800/month on Heroku vs $75/month for a reserved EC2 instance with comparable RAM. That's an astounding difference in price for cloud storage! Of course, the real competition is other data-storage services like Amazon RDS, MongoHQ, MongoLab, etc. (all much cheaper) (OK, so I excluded EBS costs from my EC2 comparison above but at $0.10/GB-month it's still going to be a huge difference for most cases)
      - omfg 15y ago
        Your numbers are a bit off. It's more like 162 bucks a month for a comparable reserved EC2 instance. And 208 a month for a comparable reserved RDS instance. And that's of course with a 12 month commitment. You can't really compare EC2 to an offering like this because you're paying for the amount of time / labor costs it frees up. And of course RDS doesn't support Postgres so there's not a lot of competition at the moment.
thibaut_barrere 15y ago
It's some money but I'm definitely interested. Scroll down and you see some interesting things: - fork of databases (looks great to try out migrations easily) - read-only asynchronous replicas - connection from EC2 or elsewhere - health checks and "continuous protection" Looks fairly solid at first sight.
1gor 15y ago
what competes with this? http://xeround.com http://xeround.com is a separate DB service, also heroku plugin. It is MySql-compatible, apparently they've wrote a custom distributed engine. Its is located on AWS or rackspace, so latency is quite low. Since xeround is pay-as-you go, if your initial DB requirements are low, you can run it on something like http://fluxflex.com http://fluxflex.com (which heroku-like PaaS, also AWS-based) and have 10 db-backed apps for something like $3 per month that will scale up when needed.

modoc 15y ago

I've seen a lot of "Cloud" database services lately, and while I love the general idea, from what I've seen in real life, for any serious db use, the impact of network latency is a HUGE problem. So unless this service happens to be residing in the same data center as your application it doesn't seem like a viable option. The difference between a local DB with <2 ms latency to a remote DB with ~50 ms latency is huge. I've seen application start times go from 1-2 minutes to 20-30 minutes by pointing at a remote DB. So if your app is even somewhat DB intensive, you really need <2 ms latency to your DB, and if it's not DB intensive, you probably don't need all the scaling and other infrastructure strengths these services bring to the table.

michaelbuckbee 15y ago
I think you are correct. I'd guess that the major target of this would be applications already running on AWS (which would put them mostly in the same datacenter). Obviously, a bunch of caveats about availability zones, etc.
joshu 15y ago
I think this is enormously exacerbated by roundtripping. Even if it's just 2ms away, and you go back and forth a few dozen times, you are doing a ton of waiting. This is one of the problem with joinless NoSQL databases, as well, since you HAVE to roundtrip to join.
- randomdata 15y ago
  You don't have to. For instance, in CouchDB, you can use view collation to retrieve related documents in a single request.
  - joshu 15y ago
    That sounds like a join by another name :)
    - randomdata 15y ago

jaylevitt 15y ago

I wonder if they have any "special sauce" in running PostgreSQL on EC2, or if the real value is in the easy provisioning? We're running PG 9.0 on EC2 now via EBS, and everything I've read says it's tough to get it performant - even with large volumes and RAID 10, you still get spikes when your virtualization neighbors slam the disk.

notaddicted 15y ago
Considering their "Continuous Protection" feature, could they be streaming a write log out to S3? I think that way they could use the backup as the sole guarantee of durability, and use instance storage for the database. EDIT: also, I'm not sure if this is generally known elsewhere, but might they not be on ec2, they are advertising 1.7 GB cache, which is the same as a small instance, except without any room for the operating system or postgres itself.
- imbriaco 15y ago
  You're exactly right about log streaming to S3. We open sourced the tool that we use to perform that: https://github.com/heroku/wal-e https://github.com/heroku/wal-e
  - bdonlan 15y ago
    S3 doesn't support continual logging - you need to decide on a file size up-front. Are you creating a new object for each log entry, or is there a window in which commits can be lost before the log gets flushed out, or do you have some other workaround...?
    - joevandyk 15y ago
      There's a window of a couple minutes in which data could be lost (in the worst case scenario).
      - sector 15y ago

mark_l_watson 15y ago

I wish that they also sold their minimal shared 20GB $15/month database plan as a separate service (i.e., being able to access it from your own EC2 instances and not just from Heroku deployed apps). I have a use case for a low volume app that I would like to host on Heroku, but have other software also have access to the database, without resorting to the obvious workarounds.

sjs382 15y ago

I think this is amazing, and immediately had a project in mind for this. But then, I looked at their pricing: $200/mo at the lowest price point. It's still incredibly affordable, but not for what I had in mind. I wish they had lower levels so I could play.

Anjin 15y ago
I'm guessing that they will shortly as it seems like it is a big market hole to plug. I'd bet that since the lowest priced dedicated DB for a heroku app is $200, they've just moved that functionality over. There's probably some complexity in getting shared cheaper DBs available that we don't know about.

jtchang 15y ago

I don't know about you guys but one of the cheapest optimizations you can do is making sure your database and application server are "close" to each other. Does a cloud database service make sense? Maybe. Databases have gotten easier and easier to setup. In addition they are quite optimized in terms of processing power. I'm not sure I want to give up control my database just yet.

KaiX 15y ago

why is PostgreSQL instead of MySQL? What are the advantages of Postgres over MySQL in DBaaS implementation? I've seen some Database-as-a-service projects and all of them chooses PostgreSQL.

mgkimsal 15y ago
licensing might be an issue.
einhverfr 15y ago
Probably because for the sorts of applications dbaas implementations target, PostgreSQL dominates the market among open source solutions. MySQL is very popular on the web site, but as a database serving multiple applications from the same db, PostgreSQL has been the de facto choice in the open source world since I have been working with db's (at least the last 12 years).

tlogan 15y ago

Hmm.. It seems expensive. For this price I would chose Oracle Database RDS. Small Oracle DB instance is ~120/month on AWS.

CarlHoerberg 15y ago

Disclaimer: I own Cloud Postgres Soon to be released: https://www.cloudpostgres.com/ https://www.cloudpostgres.com/ Lower prices PostgreSQL 9.1 Optional PGPool in front of the replicas for load balancing Multiple datacenters