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These Postgres, and serverless databases are all so overhyped. I have tried all of them and they all are much slower than just deploying a managed database in t

These Postgres, and serverless databases are all so overhyped. I have tried all of them and they all are much slower than just deploying a managed database in the same datacenter as your application. I have an application deployed on Railway with a Postgres database and the user's latency is consistent 150ms. The same application deployed on these serverless/edge provider is anywhere between 300-400ms with random spikes to 800ms. The same application, same data, and same query. The edge and serverless has to be the biggest scam in cloud industry right now. They aren't faster, and they aren't cheaper. You could argue they are easier to scale, but that not he case anymore since everyone provides autoscaling now.

mritchie712 1y ago
supabase lured me in with built-in oauth, real-time, and some nice client side features in their JS lib, but I do worry about the latency sometimes. It'd be a lot of work to run an apples to apples test with a Google Cloud Postgres db vs. Supabase and see what the difference is.
cpursley 1y ago
Whatever. I was able to set up Neon Postgres in 5 mins. It’s still crazy fast with my Fly services, has replication out of the box and backups. Much easier than AWS and from what I can tell, getting something going with Railway. And I don’t have to worry about operating it. My time is valuable.
- mbreese 1y ago
  All of that can be true. What I wonder is — if that all is true — how much of a moat is there around that? It seems like the secret sauce in that company isn’t some custom technology, it’s execution. Execution can be replicated by another competent team. Or is there some other secret sauce that I can’t see?
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    Execution is some of the hardest secret sauce of all
    - mbreese 1y ago
      I completely agree... in my comment, the word "competent" was doing a lot of heavy lifting. And it begs comparisons to comments about Dropbox/rsync, etc... But, I personally think the Neon concept of branching databases with CoW storage is quite interesting. That, combined with cost-management with autoscaling does seem like at least a serviceable moat.
  - vladich 1y ago
    It's the team, they have a few Postgres committers and major contributors, and there are not that many of them. But that's a bit precarious, the team may leave after the acquisition for many reasons.
- impulser_ 1y ago
  These are features of any managed database service. DigitalOcean, Railway, Render, and so on all offer the exact same feature except it's just pure Postgres and you can deploy them in the same data center as your application.
  - cpursley 1y ago
    Render nor DO offer logical replication and are missing some other features.
- _1tem 1y ago
  400ms added latency is really bad for user experience. Do a few queries and you’re going to need to add caching. Now you’re spending your precious developer time managing caching invalidation in lots of places instead of just setting up your database properly in the beginning.
  - cpursley 1y ago
    Except it's not between neon and fly: https://neon.tech/blog/how-to-minimise-the-impact-of-database-latency https://neon.tech/blog/how-to-minimise-the-impact-of-databas... https://neon.tech/demos/regional-latency https://neon.tech/demos/regional-latency
    - _1tem 1y ago
      I understand there are ways to deal with the problem of latency in serverless, but this is a problem I'd rather not deal with in the first place. The database IS the application, and I would not want to sacrifice speed of the database for anything. Serverless is totally not worth the trade-off for me: slightly more convenient deployments, for much higher latency to the database. I'm a solo dev that has been installing and running my own database server with backups for decades and have never had a problem with it. It's so simple, and I have no idea why people are so allergic to managing their own server. 99% of apps can run very snappily on a single server, and the simplicity is a breath of fresh air.
      - pdimitar 1y ago
        That's why I'm working hard on bringing in a tightly integrated support for SQLite in the Elixir ecosystem (via a Rust FFI bridge): because in my professional experience not many applications need something as hardcore and amazing as PostgreSQL; at least 80% of all apps I ever witnessed would be just fine with an embedded database. I share similar experiences like yours and others in this thread, and to me all those operational concerns grow into unnecessary noise that distracts from the real problems that we are paid to solve.
  - tristan957 1y ago
_1tem 1y ago
Even managed databases are a scam. You can easily get 10x cheaper pricing for the same workload, by, wait for it, installing Postgres yourself on a baremetal machine. Plus you get much better performance, no noisy neighbors, and ability to actually control and measure low level performance. I never got the hype for serverless. Why are people so allergic to setting up a server? It takes a few hours a year of investment, and the performance benefits are huge.
- tristan957 1y ago
  > Even managed databases are a scam Just because you don't derive value out of something doesn't mean it is a scam.
atombender 1y ago
Isn't this an apples-to-orange comparison? Neon's multi-region support isn't directly comparable to a single Postgres database in a single data center. You can set up Neon in a single data center, too, and I would expect the same performance in that case. Meanwhile, if you tried to scale your single-Postgres to a multi-region setup, you'd expect higher latencies relative to the location of your data.

mritchie712 1y ago

supabase lured me in with built-in oauth, real-time, and some nice client side features in their JS lib, but I do worry about the latency sometimes. It'd be a lot of work to run an apples to apples test with a Google Cloud Postgres db vs. Supabase and see what the difference is.

cpursley 1y ago

Whatever. I was able to set up Neon Postgres in 5 mins. It’s still crazy fast with my Fly services, has replication out of the box and backups. Much easier than AWS and from what I can tell, getting something going with Railway. And I don’t have to worry about operating it. My time is valuable.

mbreese 1y ago
All of that can be true. What I wonder is — if that all is true — how much of a moat is there around that? It seems like the secret sauce in that company isn’t some custom technology, it’s execution. Execution can be replicated by another competent team. Or is there some other secret sauce that I can’t see?
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  Execution is some of the hardest secret sauce of all
  - mbreese 1y ago
    I completely agree... in my comment, the word "competent" was doing a lot of heavy lifting. And it begs comparisons to comments about Dropbox/rsync, etc... But, I personally think the Neon concept of branching databases with CoW storage is quite interesting. That, combined with cost-management with autoscaling does seem like at least a serviceable moat.
- vladich 1y ago
  It's the team, they have a few Postgres committers and major contributors, and there are not that many of them. But that's a bit precarious, the team may leave after the acquisition for many reasons.
impulser_ 1y ago
These are features of any managed database service. DigitalOcean, Railway, Render, and so on all offer the exact same feature except it's just pure Postgres and you can deploy them in the same data center as your application.
- cpursley 1y ago
  Render nor DO offer logical replication and are missing some other features.
_1tem 1y ago
400ms added latency is really bad for user experience. Do a few queries and you’re going to need to add caching. Now you’re spending your precious developer time managing caching invalidation in lots of places instead of just setting up your database properly in the beginning.
- cpursley 1y ago
  Except it's not between neon and fly: https://neon.tech/blog/how-to-minimise-the-impact-of-database-latency https://neon.tech/blog/how-to-minimise-the-impact-of-databas... https://neon.tech/demos/regional-latency https://neon.tech/demos/regional-latency
  - _1tem 1y ago
    I understand there are ways to deal with the problem of latency in serverless, but this is a problem I'd rather not deal with in the first place. The database IS the application, and I would not want to sacrifice speed of the database for anything. Serverless is totally not worth the trade-off for me: slightly more convenient deployments, for much higher latency to the database. I'm a solo dev that has been installing and running my own database server with backups for decades and have never had a problem with it. It's so simple, and I have no idea why people are so allergic to managing their own server. 99% of apps can run very snappily on a single server, and the simplicity is a breath of fresh air.
    - pdimitar 1y ago
      That's why I'm working hard on bringing in a tightly integrated support for SQLite in the Elixir ecosystem (via a Rust FFI bridge): because in my professional experience not many applications need something as hardcore and amazing as PostgreSQL; at least 80% of all apps I ever witnessed would be just fine with an embedded database. I share similar experiences like yours and others in this thread, and to me all those operational concerns grow into unnecessary noise that distracts from the real problems that we are paid to solve.
- tristan957 1y ago

_1tem 1y ago

Even managed databases are a scam. You can easily get 10x cheaper pricing for the same workload, by, wait for it, installing Postgres yourself on a baremetal machine. Plus you get much better performance, no noisy neighbors, and ability to actually control and measure low level performance. I never got the hype for serverless. Why are people so allergic to setting up a server? It takes a few hours a year of investment, and the performance benefits are huge.

tristan957 1y ago
> Even managed databases are a scam Just because you don't derive value out of something doesn't mean it is a scam.

atombender 1y ago

Isn't this an apples-to-orange comparison? Neon's multi-region support isn't directly comparable to a single Postgres database in a single data center. You can set up Neon in a single data center, too, and I would expect the same performance in that case. Meanwhile, if you tried to scale your single-Postgres to a multi-region setup, you'd expect higher latencies relative to the location of your data.