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> You can spin up a Postgres database, or a whole cluster, with just a couple of commands. Sign up for Fly.io and launch a full-stack app in minutes! What is t

> You can spin up a Postgres database, or a whole cluster, with just a couple of commands. Sign up for Fly.io and launch a full-stack app in minutes! What is the HackerNews opinion on: who is their actual customer? Obviously lots of companies pay for managed databases. It's not an uncrowded market for a reason. But like... pricing wise... it seems so expensive? What is the HackerNews take on the valuable proposition specifically for hosted databases? Is the answer basically 1:1 with anything cloud hosting related?

rozenmd 4y ago
Last I checked, a 4 vCPU/16GB RAM/1TB storage configuration costs around $80 USD per month at VPS hosts like Hetzner. It's $762 USD per month on RDS. There are trade-offs of course (https://onlineornot.com/self-hosting-vs-managed-services-deciding-how-host-your-database https://onlineornot.com/self-hosting-vs-managed-services-dec...) between the two options. I've been hoping fly.io builds a strong automated middle ground for a while now!
- w-ll 4y ago
  Am I reading https://instances.vantage.sh/rds/?min_vcpus=4&cost_duration=monthly https://instances.vantage.sh/rds/?min_vcpus=4&cost_duration=... wrong. It seams you can get that as a db.t4g.xlarge for ~$188/month. Still more than 2x the cost, but not nearly $760
  - ithrow 4y ago
    $188 without storage and bandwidth.
  - some_developer 4y ago
    > for ~$188/month. Note that this is still the on-demand price. Although it's still not Apple to Apple, no one (sane) would useRDS 24x7 without RI. That probably brings you down another 50 bucks or so.
  - mnutt 4y ago
    The t4g instances are also burstable so running your database with 4 cores under load would either get you throttled or produce more charges.
    - losteric 4y ago
      and the price excludes the 1.5 TB EBS volume
  - whakim 4y ago
    Yeah, tack on another $115 or so for the 1TB of storage. And as a sibling comment mentions, on-demand pricing means it isn't really an apples-to-apples comparison. In almost every case other than a hobby project it feels like the convenience of RDS vastly outweighs the savings of ~$250 you'd get by self-hosting.
- macNchz 4y ago
  A few years ago I managed a 10TB Postgres cluster backing a moderately high traffic site. I no longer even give the briefest of blinks at any of the fully managed database prices that used to make my eyes water.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Because you feel like you got good value for your 10TB DB or because you feel like you got fleeced? Not sure I understand your undertone. Cheers
    - HillRat 4y ago
      I think the implication is, “I used to manage my own DB instance and I’m now willing to pay anything even vaguely reasonable to not have to do that again.”
      - macNchz 4y ago
        Correct!
nicoburns 4y ago
> who is their actual customer? Anyone who wants a managed database + to run Docker contains on VMs without having to do much ops work or deal with the complexities of the big clouds. > But like... pricing wise... it seems so expensive? It's quite a bit cheaper than Heroku who run a similar service and have bootloads of customers.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > Anyone who wants a managed database + to run Docker contains on VMs without having to do much ops work or deal with the complexities of the big clouds. At what cost though? Why not run a VM that runs Postgres? It might take a week to set up in terms of automated backups, cluster, failover, etc. (ok, maybe a few more weeks) but hosted DB costing 5x the underlying VPS is insane?
  - tptacek 4y ago
    By all means, if you have a database stack you're comfortable managing yourself, use it! We did Fly Postgres because we more or less had to, not because we want to own the storage stack on Fly.io. We want, in fact, the exact opposite thing. If you've got a database stack you enjoy managing, and extra time on your hands, spin it up for other Fly.io customers as a product! We'll love you for it.
  - dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
    You know a week of an engineer is multiple thousands of dollars right?
    - treewalking 4y ago
      Why spend a few hundred dollars when you can spend tens of thousands!
    - sodapopcan 4y ago
      I can understand the flawed line of thinking that leads to not taking salaries and time into consideration when making comments like "why not just do it yourself?", but it's interesting how rampant it is. I've worked with people who are like, "To avoid paying some company $999/year, I'm going to invest $1,500 of my time setting up a free version running on hardware that has a smaller recurring cost (but still does have a cost). And let's just not worry about how much of my time might be required to support this once it's up an running."
newaccount2021 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mdasen 4y ago
Unlike your code which you can redeploy after a bit of downtime, you might not be able to un-f^ck your database. I think that's ultimately the selling point. No one wants to be responsible for keeping the data safe when it's not their job. Do you work at a company that is going to applaud you for testing your backups? If not, you're wasting your time doing that. Do you work at a company that is going to promote you for getting high-availability right before an outage happens? Some people certainly do work for companies like that. I'm sure big places like Facebook or Apple or Netflix applaud and promote people for this - and have the scale at which having people working on these problems makes sense. At your startup with a few dozen people? Probably not. If you're not building the product, you're not helping the company succeed. Ok, you're saving the company a bit of money, but at the cost of your time and the cost of the company actually getting product out the door, finding product-market-fit, etc. Do you want to use your employee time setting up a HA database cluster and saving the company $1,000 per month or developing your app? That's a key question: pay Linode $1,560/mo for a 3-node 32GB RAM cluster or launch 3 32GB boxes for $720, figure out PostgreSQL replication, make sure you setup the replication users, make sure you don't open any security holes, make sure you have Patroni or Stolon so that you can switch over when the primary fails, make sure you have etcd or Consul or something to handle that coordination, make sure that you have Barman or pgBackRest setup to take your WAL and persist it to S3, setup your S3 buckets, setup a full backup schedule so that you can restore easily, make sure that you're regularly testing your restores, make sure that you're testing your failover (do you even know if Patroni is actually working?), figure out how your app is going to cut over to the new primary when that happens (is there a shared IP that you need to move, are you using a proxy like HAProxy that's checking health-checks to see which it should proxy to, etc). Or would you rather just pay someone $1,000/mo so that you don't have to deal with that? I hate paying up for something I feel like I should be able to do myself, but it does make some sense. If I decide I don't want to pay for Google Cloud Run and my servers all die, I can boot up some new boxes and get my app running again with some downtime. That's not great, but recoverable. If I don't want to pay for Google Cloud SQL and my servers die, now I'm hoping that my backups were working, that I can bring a much more complicated deployment back online than just some random process or container, etc. One of those two just carries more risk. Yes, backups should work and should be tested and you should even test backups in a managed service, but if you're a startup trying to move fast and find product market fit, I'm guessing that the premium is worth saving your engineers that time. I hate saying that because cloud providers are pushing such high margins, but it's probably true. As a curiosity, do you run your own databases? If so, which? Do you find that everything Just Works or that it's a pain to get everything running, debugging things, testing backups, etc.? Is this in a high-traffic, commercial situation or just as a hobby? I think hosting your own database is relatively easy if you're just going to have one server and pg_dump -> rsync a backup nightly. In the rare event that you lose a server, maybe have an hour of downtime. If you're able to recover within 50 minutes and you lose a server every week, you're still at 99.5% uptime. If you can recover in 40 minutes and you lose a server every month, you're at 99.9% uptime. Do we need more? How often does a VM go down (note, don't say "I have 1,000 servers and I lose one every other day" - that would mean the average instance is lasting several years)? Won't Google's live-migration of VMs handle a lot of that? So, it's trade-offs, but I think we're not living in a world where companies say "we're not going to architect for HA and we'll suffer an hour or two of downtime every year or two when we lose a box." Sometimes we certainly get ourselves into situations where we've made complicated systems that end up having complicated failure scenarios too. Still, I think managed databases are an easy sell, even at their premium price point.
mrkurt 4y ago
Our pricing is a rorschach test. If you come from Heroku, we seem too cheap: https://community.fly.io/t/comparison-of-prices-to-heroku/8941 https://community.fly.io/t/comparison-of-prices-to-heroku/89... If you are most familiar with AWS, we seem pretty close to what you're used to. But very cheap for egress. If you are a DigitalOcean user, VMs seem pretty ok, but bandwidth seems more expensive. If you are a CloudFlare user, you think everything else is too expensive until they try to sell you an Enterprise plan. If you're a happy user of Hetzner or OVH, you pay something close to the same price as we do for servers. And might be surprised at our prices. Because we also want to have reasonable margins. People really like us when they have an app that seems valuable to them, they don't want to think hard about running servers, but they do know they can "eject" and run the rest of their infra too: https://community.fly.io/t/startup-credit-program/6709/3?u=kurt https://community.fly.io/t/startup-credit-program/6709/3?u=k...
- mdasen 4y ago
  Fly.io's pricing seems fair. It's not amazingly cheap, but there aren't a lot of PaaS offerings out there and most are very expensive and have complicated pricing compared to Fly.io - even Digital Ocean's AppPlatform is more expensive. I am curious about the freemium model for PaaS systems. I've always wondered what percent of compute ends up being free and if the paid prices have to be higher to subsidize the free tier. Would it be better for the paying customers if the service was 30% cheaper and there was no free tier? Of course, I might be incredibly far off on how much the free tier customers cost. I think for people that think Fly.io is expensive, it just feels like what Fly.io does should be table stakes rather than a premium service in 2022 - and yet it's so hard to find! Heroku is 15 years old and Fly.io feels like the first platform I've used since that just gets it. I would say that a collaboration between you and Neon (https://neon.tech/ https://neon.tech/) would be pretty cool. While your site does link to Neon as a recommendation, Neon's datacenters often aren't that proximal to Fly.io's - Ohio isn't that close to Chicago, Virginia, or New Jersey. Maybe that'll get better in the future. I'd always love it if Fly.io were cheaper, but more than that I'm glad that Fly.io seems to really get what customers need.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  > If you are a CloudFlare user, you think everything else is too expensive until they try to sell you an Enterprise plan. tbf, Cloudflare's Enterprise plan includes usage, too. Just like Fly's own plans: https://fly.io/plans https://fly.io/plans Besides, the Cloudflare platform is way more reliable and their products actually make it to GA :)
cplusplusfellow 4y ago
Let us put 3tb, let alone 4pb through this. Can anyone tell me I should or shouldn’t trust I’ll be ok?

rozenmd 4y ago

Last I checked, a 4 vCPU/16GB RAM/1TB storage configuration costs around $80 USD per month at VPS hosts like Hetzner. It's $762 USD per month on RDS. There are trade-offs of course (https://onlineornot.com/self-hosting-vs-managed-services-deciding-how-host-your-database https://onlineornot.com/self-hosting-vs-managed-services-dec...) between the two options. I've been hoping fly.io builds a strong automated middle ground for a while now!

w-ll 4y ago
Am I reading https://instances.vantage.sh/rds/?min_vcpus=4&cost_duration=monthly https://instances.vantage.sh/rds/?min_vcpus=4&cost_duration=... wrong. It seams you can get that as a db.t4g.xlarge for ~$188/month. Still more than 2x the cost, but not nearly $760
- ithrow 4y ago
  $188 without storage and bandwidth.
- some_developer 4y ago
  > for ~$188/month. Note that this is still the on-demand price. Although it's still not Apple to Apple, no one (sane) would useRDS 24x7 without RI. That probably brings you down another 50 bucks or so.
- mnutt 4y ago
  The t4g instances are also burstable so running your database with 4 cores under load would either get you throttled or produce more charges.
  - losteric 4y ago
    and the price excludes the 1.5 TB EBS volume
- whakim 4y ago
  Yeah, tack on another $115 or so for the 1TB of storage. And as a sibling comment mentions, on-demand pricing means it isn't really an apples-to-apples comparison. In almost every case other than a hobby project it feels like the convenience of RDS vastly outweighs the savings of ~$250 you'd get by self-hosting.
macNchz 4y ago
A few years ago I managed a 10TB Postgres cluster backing a moderately high traffic site. I no longer even give the briefest of blinks at any of the fully managed database prices that used to make my eyes water.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  Because you feel like you got good value for your 10TB DB or because you feel like you got fleeced? Not sure I understand your undertone. Cheers
  - HillRat 4y ago
    I think the implication is, “I used to manage my own DB instance and I’m now willing to pay anything even vaguely reasonable to not have to do that again.”
    - macNchz 4y ago
      Correct!

nicoburns 4y ago

> who is their actual customer? Anyone who wants a managed database + to run Docker contains on VMs without having to do much ops work or deal with the complexities of the big clouds. > But like... pricing wise... it seems so expensive? It's quite a bit cheaper than Heroku who run a similar service and have bootloads of customers.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> Anyone who wants a managed database + to run Docker contains on VMs without having to do much ops work or deal with the complexities of the big clouds. At what cost though? Why not run a VM that runs Postgres? It might take a week to set up in terms of automated backups, cluster, failover, etc. (ok, maybe a few more weeks) but hosted DB costing 5x the underlying VPS is insane?
- tptacek 4y ago
  By all means, if you have a database stack you're comfortable managing yourself, use it! We did Fly Postgres because we more or less had to, not because we want to own the storage stack on Fly.io. We want, in fact, the exact opposite thing. If you've got a database stack you enjoy managing, and extra time on your hands, spin it up for other Fly.io customers as a product! We'll love you for it.
- dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
  You know a week of an engineer is multiple thousands of dollars right?
  - treewalking 4y ago
    Why spend a few hundred dollars when you can spend tens of thousands!
  - sodapopcan 4y ago
    I can understand the flawed line of thinking that leads to not taking salaries and time into consideration when making comments like "why not just do it yourself?", but it's interesting how rampant it is. I've worked with people who are like, "To avoid paying some company $999/year, I'm going to invest $1,500 of my time setting up a free version running on hardware that has a smaller recurring cost (but still does have a cost). And let's just not worry about how much of my time might be required to support this once it's up an running."

newaccount2021 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mdasen 4y ago

Unlike your code which you can redeploy after a bit of downtime, you might not be able to un-f^ck your database. I think that's ultimately the selling point. No one wants to be responsible for keeping the data safe when it's not their job. Do you work at a company that is going to applaud you for testing your backups? If not, you're wasting your time doing that. Do you work at a company that is going to promote you for getting high-availability right before an outage happens? Some people certainly do work for companies like that. I'm sure big places like Facebook or Apple or Netflix applaud and promote people for this - and have the scale at which having people working on these problems makes sense. At your startup with a few dozen people? Probably not. If you're not building the product, you're not helping the company succeed. Ok, you're saving the company a bit of money, but at the cost of your time and the cost of the company actually getting product out the door, finding product-market-fit, etc. Do you want to use your employee time setting up a HA database cluster and saving the company $1,000 per month or developing your app? That's a key question: pay Linode $1,560/mo for a 3-node 32GB RAM cluster or launch 3 32GB boxes for $720, figure out PostgreSQL replication, make sure you setup the replication users, make sure you don't open any security holes, make sure you have Patroni or Stolon so that you can switch over when the primary fails, make sure you have etcd or Consul or something to handle that coordination, make sure that you have Barman or pgBackRest setup to take your WAL and persist it to S3, setup your S3 buckets, setup a full backup schedule so that you can restore easily, make sure that you're regularly testing your restores, make sure that you're testing your failover (do you even know if Patroni is actually working?), figure out how your app is going to cut over to the new primary when that happens (is there a shared IP that you need to move, are you using a proxy like HAProxy that's checking health-checks to see which it should proxy to, etc). Or would you rather just pay someone $1,000/mo so that you don't have to deal with that? I hate paying up for something I feel like I should be able to do myself, but it does make some sense. If I decide I don't want to pay for Google Cloud Run and my servers all die, I can boot up some new boxes and get my app running again with some downtime. That's not great, but recoverable. If I don't want to pay for Google Cloud SQL and my servers die, now I'm hoping that my backups were working, that I can bring a much more complicated deployment back online than just some random process or container, etc. One of those two just carries more risk. Yes, backups should work and should be tested and you should even test backups in a managed service, but if you're a startup trying to move fast and find product market fit, I'm guessing that the premium is worth saving your engineers that time. I hate saying that because cloud providers are pushing such high margins, but it's probably true. As a curiosity, do you run your own databases? If so, which? Do you find that everything Just Works or that it's a pain to get everything running, debugging things, testing backups, etc.? Is this in a high-traffic, commercial situation or just as a hobby? I think hosting your own database is relatively easy if you're just going to have one server and pg_dump -> rsync a backup nightly. In the rare event that you lose a server, maybe have an hour of downtime. If you're able to recover within 50 minutes and you lose a server every week, you're still at 99.5% uptime. If you can recover in 40 minutes and you lose a server every month, you're at 99.9% uptime. Do we need more? How often does a VM go down (note, don't say "I have 1,000 servers and I lose one every other day" - that would mean the average instance is lasting several years)? Won't Google's live-migration of VMs handle a lot of that? So, it's trade-offs, but I think we're not living in a world where companies say "we're not going to architect for HA and we'll suffer an hour or two of downtime every year or two when we lose a box." Sometimes we certainly get ourselves into situations where we've made complicated systems that end up having complicated failure scenarios too. Still, I think managed databases are an easy sell, even at their premium price point.

mrkurt 4y ago

Our pricing is a rorschach test. If you come from Heroku, we seem too cheap: https://community.fly.io/t/comparison-of-prices-to-heroku/8941 https://community.fly.io/t/comparison-of-prices-to-heroku/89... If you are most familiar with AWS, we seem pretty close to what you're used to. But very cheap for egress. If you are a DigitalOcean user, VMs seem pretty ok, but bandwidth seems more expensive. If you are a CloudFlare user, you think everything else is too expensive until they try to sell you an Enterprise plan. If you're a happy user of Hetzner or OVH, you pay something close to the same price as we do for servers. And might be surprised at our prices. Because we also want to have reasonable margins. People really like us when they have an app that seems valuable to them, they don't want to think hard about running servers, but they do know they can "eject" and run the rest of their infra too: https://community.fly.io/t/startup-credit-program/6709/3?u=kurt https://community.fly.io/t/startup-credit-program/6709/3?u=k...

mdasen 4y ago
Fly.io's pricing seems fair. It's not amazingly cheap, but there aren't a lot of PaaS offerings out there and most are very expensive and have complicated pricing compared to Fly.io - even Digital Ocean's AppPlatform is more expensive. I am curious about the freemium model for PaaS systems. I've always wondered what percent of compute ends up being free and if the paid prices have to be higher to subsidize the free tier. Would it be better for the paying customers if the service was 30% cheaper and there was no free tier? Of course, I might be incredibly far off on how much the free tier customers cost. I think for people that think Fly.io is expensive, it just feels like what Fly.io does should be table stakes rather than a premium service in 2022 - and yet it's so hard to find! Heroku is 15 years old and Fly.io feels like the first platform I've used since that just gets it. I would say that a collaboration between you and Neon (https://neon.tech/ https://neon.tech/) would be pretty cool. While your site does link to Neon as a recommendation, Neon's datacenters often aren't that proximal to Fly.io's - Ohio isn't that close to Chicago, Virginia, or New Jersey. Maybe that'll get better in the future. I'd always love it if Fly.io were cheaper, but more than that I'm glad that Fly.io seems to really get what customers need.
ignoramous 4y ago
> If you are a CloudFlare user, you think everything else is too expensive until they try to sell you an Enterprise plan. tbf, Cloudflare's Enterprise plan includes usage, too. Just like Fly's own plans: https://fly.io/plans https://fly.io/plans Besides, the Cloudflare platform is way more reliable and their products actually make it to GA :)

cplusplusfellow 4y ago

Let us put 3tb, let alone 4pb through this. Can anyone tell me I should or shouldn’t trust I’ll be ok?