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ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down
- js4ever 3y agoFor existing customers looking for an alternative you can check this: https://elest.io/open-source/postgresql https://elest.io/open-source/postgresql
- colesantiago 3y agoThis makes sense, but also not surprised. In today's world there are countless Postgres providers (Supabase, RDS, DigitalOcean, GCP, Azure, etc) so there is plenty of choice now. Although I don't see why anyone would choose niche providers today other than the cloud provided ones like RDS now.
- a2800276 3y agoBecause RDS forces you to deal with the AWS behemouth instead if just changing your database connect parameters.
- emilsedgh 3y agoCare to elaborate?
- lars_francke 3y agoNot OP but even setting up an AWS Account is a roughly hundred step process. Root account, IAM Accounts, I just tried using CLIv2 which asked me to set up something called Identity center first? Billing is complicated, setting up looking and metrics... Another two services. Some other best practice things... Also extra services. AWS is complicated. There is - for me and seemingly others - a lot of value in avoiding this complexity. AWS used to be easy to use for "drive by users". It's not anymore.
- a2800276 3y agoWell put, that's in essence what I meant. If you are using AWS anyway and are accustomed to it, obviously, RDS is a good choice. But I don't want to learn what DNS and Filesystem are called in AWS-speak just to shoehorn myself into getting stuck with AWS forever, when all I need is a hosted database so I don't have to worry about backups, etc. My typical situation sees small to medium (virtual) servers that run software for tens to possibly thousands of users. There are plenty of use cases that aren't "google scale" and can be operated on a simple machine and can profit from a "simple" hosted DB. Rant: Same goes for things like CDNs, I'd guess that 99% of websites don't get nearly the amount of traffic that a simple linux server couldn't handle out of the box. Let alone need sub 100ms ping responses, yet there is this weird cargo cult that requires putting your terraformed, docker stuff running javascript from with a python container with multiple layers of caching behind cloudflare because people don't dare consider simple architectures.
- jasongi 3y agoI would argue there is limited/no market for Database as a Service where the database isn’t hosted on the same cloud provider and region as your application. Egress costs way too much for that. So you’d assume most people are already dealing with the AWS behemoth. And if the cloud provider is providing a competing Database as a Service then it’s almost impossible to compete.
- mythz 3y agoEgress costs are only expensive if you're paying the artificially high mega cloud corp's inflated pricing. I've yet to pay for bandwidth for any servers on Hetzner or for Cloudflare's services.
- eddd-ddde 3y agoAlso Cloudflare just released the GA of Hyperdrive which makes it even more reasonable to use Postgres with them. Also it's free!
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Because RDS forces you to deal with the AWS behemouth instead if just changing your database connect parameters. This is one of the things I quite liked about Azure, funnily enough. They basically give you a connection string. It's not ideal, and I think for production we did something slightly different with Azure identities, but it got us going quickly, and the identities thing devops just swapped in later behind the scenes. Other than that it was just regular Postgres.
- swiftcoder 3y agoWhat? RDS supports username+password authentication for the database connection
- jmull 3y agoThat’s true, though you have to engage with the behemoth to get to that point.
- tmountain 3y agoSupabase provides a lot of added value regarding tools and auth with SSO, so it’s more than just Postgres.
- jpalomaki 3y agoone way to think: managing state (database) is hard. You need to manage replication, backups, version upgrades etc. Compared to this, stateless application server part is usually quite easy. If you would like to be cost effective, with small team, you could outsource the database part and manage the applications on dedicated servers.
- asah 3y agoFor analytics, the database can be anywhere and the niche providers offer multiplicative performance/cost gains.
- dgellow 3y agoI had good experience with Aiven in the past, we needed something located in the EU: https://aiven.io/ https://aiven.io/
- giovannibonetti 3y agoIt's more expensive than AWS RDS and Google Cloud SQL, but their service seems more comprehensive, with fast major version upgrade, multi-cloud deployment and built-in PgBouncer integration. For business critical operations, it is probably worth it.
- dgellow 3y agoThey also have (or had? That was a few years ago) pretty good support
- a2800276 3y agoWhat a shame. This is "cloud" as it ought to be: be clear about the service you provide, provide it well, no lock in. Simple and matter-of-factly. I just started evaluating them about a month ago, loved their hosted postgres and a couple of days later the EOL announcement poped up in my dashboard :(
- conradfr 3y agoThe service is good but it was definitely not clear upfront about the postgresql version you were getting when selecting a region / provider.
- isodev 3y agoAbsolutely. I’ve been a customer for many years and it’s always been a pleasure to interact with such a simple, transparent and “to the point” UI. The fact that they are a tiny team also bumps it up the list for me.
- tbarbugli 3y agowell, they shut this down probably because they cannot afford to keep a product that bring little revenue. I never heard of AWS retiring a product (I am excluding ancient stuff like VPC classic and SimpleDB, both had an upgrade path to something superior)
- dtech 3y agoI assume AWS fully automates their stuff so the maintenance is ~0 outside their normal datacenter and SRE stuff which amortizes the total cost to ~0, so why retire a service? Just stop development.
- Arbortheus 3y agoThere’s no such thing as zero cost to development teams. Who patches the security vulnerabilities? Who answers esoteric customer questions for customers with premium support contracts?
- jpgvm 3y agoSad but if you are going to shut something down this is the correct way so kudos.
- darkstar_16 3y agoWe've been a customer for long for some of out applications. It's a shame but I get their reasoning. The hosted postgresql market is getting crowded and it is difficult for a small shop to stand out.
- chipdart 3y agoI'm wondering why are they completely cutting off their hosted DB services instead of scaling it down. Is this something that's so time-consuming to provide at scale? I'm also questioning their decision to put all their chips on message brokers. Don't those services require fast and reliable access that is only possible if they are provided as support services running within the same network? They seem to be the kind of service that only makes sense as a value-added service provided as part of a more general cloud hosting offering.
- lolinder 3y ago> Is this something that's so time-consuming to provide at scale? I suspect it's not time but money—they host the service on various cloud providers in various data centers so that latency is low. In order to pull that off economically they have to be doing some tricks that are only possible at scale, and if they're seeing a lot of natural attrition those techniques will stop working, and they'll probably end up footing an AWS/GCP/Azure bill that won't leave any margin left for the other expenses.
- a2800276 3y agoThat's what I though, focusing on message-broker as-a-service sounds bonkers. I assume there must be a business case there that is not obvious unless you are on the inside.
- mosselman 3y agoAny strong alternatives?
- justinclift 3y agoThere's quite a few places around. Also Ubicloud look interesting, though I've not personally used them: https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql
- pwmtr 3y agoPrimary architect of Ubicloud PostgreSQL here. Thanks a lot for shout out! I'd be happy to answer if anyone has any questions about our managed service.
- slig 3y agoIs there any plans to offer your manager service at Digital Ocean / Vultr in the US?
- pwmtr 3y agoWe are planning to open up US regions quite soon but we are mostly focusing on bare metal providers at this point so Digital Ocean is out of picture.
- justinclift 3y agoStarting with Hetzner US then?
- pwmtr 3y agoHetzner unfortunately only offers VMs in US, not bare metal servers. We are evaluating potential providers. LeaseWeb is one strong candidate right now. If Hetzner offers bare metal servers in the future, we would definitely prefer them as well since we are already using Hetzner in EU. However, at the end, the goal is being provider agnostic as much as possible.
- albertgoeswoof 3y agoHow does one handle a zero downtime migration in this case? On a database of 50gib+ is this a solved problem in Postgres world?
- theK 3y agoIsn't this just the typical case of changing DB hosts? You set up replication to new location and migrate apps to new location?
- justinclift 3y agoIn theory (!), yes. It's something you'd need to trial though, perhaps a few times even.
- wejick 3y agoFrom what the migration doc says, it will only support pgdump migration. Meaning it will require downtime, or at least write downtime. Create backup using pgdump, restore the dump to new database. While making sure no changes to the old db before switch over.
- Arbortheus 3y agoThe ability to replicate from a database service is an extremely important consideration when picking any DBaaS. If you cannot do a no-downtime migration out of a database provider, you are needlessly locking yourself into a vendor.
- fourseventy 3y agoOuch that will make migrating anything over a few hundred gigs almost impossible. Our postgres db is about 2TB and pgdump stopped being viable a long time ago.
- BuildTheRobots 3y ago> Our postgres db is about 2TB and pgdump stopped being viable a long time ago. Due to the time it takes to export, or because it can't handle a database of that size at all?
- brennerm 3y agoThis might help people when looking for an alternative. https://wheretohostmy.app/?tech=%5B%22postgresql%22%5D https://wheretohostmy.app/?tech=%5B%22postgresql%22%5D It's a side project I'm currently building so hearing some feedback is highly appreciated.
- conradfr 3y agoYou're missing Scaleway as a provider I think.
- brennerm 3y agoThanks! Will be adding.
- thegeekpirate 3y agoAlso Vultr https://www.vultr.com/products/managed-databases/postgresql/ https://www.vultr.com/products/managed-databases/postgresql/
- brennerm 3y agoThanks, on my list now.
- Zambyte 3y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836495
- thegeekpirate 3y agoBe more careful about spreading misinformation, as both that story as well as the original contain posts from mods which explain it was bullshit. https://www.vultr.com/news/a-note-about-vultrs-terms-of-service https://www.vultr.com/news/a-note-about-vultrs-terms-of-serv...
- zachrip 3y ago
- ThinkBeat 3y agoGiven how many different companies now offering hosted Postgres it must be a challenging market to compete in. People get dragged into the big cloud when they start using one service or the other, moving the database if for no other reason than to minimize latency seems smart. I do agree with other people on here that dealing with a laser focused independent company is far preferable than big cluod.
- foobarkey 3y agoOwned by RDS?
- ralphc 3y agoI was a "customer" since they had a free tier for my occasional hobby projects, the only free tier I found. Anyone else offering this?
- eddd-ddde 3y agoSupabase or Neon Tech both have a form of free postgres. Not the same kind of free tho, I also loved elephant sql free tier.
- nazgulsenpai 3y agoThe Aiven company they have partnered with's website seems to be down. Bad omen.
- Zopieux 3y agoDid you even read the link?
- nazgulsenpai 3y agoYes, when you click on End of Life Customer Information it recommends moving to Aiven, which was down when I attempted (and still is).
- Elzear 3y agoOne year ago I created this list and demo of databases that are "free forever". I wonder how long it will take until none are left. https://free-databases.vercel.app https://free-databases.vercel.app
- bdcravens 3y agoDepends on how long those companies want to keep paying for something they're giving away for free.
- renegade-otter 3y agoI switched to DigitalOcean and it's been a delight. $15/month for a managed Postgres is a good deal, and I am really tired of the hellscape that has become AWS configuration even for the most simplest things. Isn't the whole point of the cloud is simplicity?
- delfinom 3y agoHahaha. The point of cloud was selling businesses on IT as a subscription. And it did start simple as "look ma, no hands managing a database". But then biggesr cloud providers went and threw themselves heavily at sales to enterprises. And well, they start adding more features for enterprises. And as they add more features, they all more technical and security complex. Next thing you know, you fired your on premise IT staff and hired just as many if not more staff just to babysit your aws usage. Lol Or you subscribe to another saas service to try and automate away automating in AWS. Lol
- intelVISA 3y agoSell the shovels, as they say. :)
- paulddraper 3y agoWhat has gotten more complicated that used to be simpler in AWS?
- tempnow987 3y agoI started with AWS pretty early. Networking was drop dead simple. Basically I think all my instances got an 10.x.x.x IP address. You had a basic firewall (security groups nowadays) but that was it. Let's say you had another account for a separate project or a client with another account. You could literally connect to their instance via private IP. All your own resources and all theirs were in this same 10.x.x.x address space which seemed to be globally reachable inside AWS. The layers of config to go across account now between different orgs is wild by comparison.
- lepetitchef 3y agoThat is sad since I used ElephantSQL in the very early days. A part of my developer projects is ElephantSQL. The closing down could be the failure to monetize cloud database model and to mitigate any risk from security point of view.
- nextworddev 3y agoIt’s pretty hard to compete selling any managed service
- twic 3y agoThis is new to me: 2025-01-28 Brownout Read more about the Brownout schedule below. 2025-02-28 Blackout Service terminated. All data deleted. Brownout schedule First week 1 hour down each day Second/Third week 8 hours down each day Forth week 24h down each day So, in case you haven't migrated off with a month to go before full shutdown (possibly because you haven't realised you're using the service, etc), they introduce intentional outages of increasing length. Harsh but effective! What's the deal with the fourth week? The service is down, but data is not yet deleted - is there still a way to export your data at that point?
- eddd-ddde 3y agoAlso 24h down each day it's a weird way of saying down the whole week.
- yoelier23 3y ago[flagged]
- j_roddy 3y agoFor anyone interested, I'm actually in the middle of building a spiritual successor to ElephantSQL for hobbyists: https://mkdb.sh https://mkdb.sh
- andrew4151 3y ago[dead]
- prosperthercv 3y agoSad to see amazing service shut down