We've been running a production workload on Postgres/Google Cloud SQL for about half a year now.

While things are good for the most part, a couple of serious problems related to connectivity have us completely boggled. We're connecting from Google Kubernetes Engine, which seems like it should be a standard combination, but run into constant problems that we've dumped many many hours into debugging.

We still haven't figured this problem out. I've found the docs to be very weak on Google's part. A lot of the troubleshooting tips are not very helpful (and can consist of unhelpful broad strokes like "be sure to use indexes!"). Because Google Cloud is not as popular than AWS, there is less community guidance from others. And what guidance does exist is often in forum threads that feel less than reputable. There's a big push to try to get you to talk to sales rep that are not technically knowledgeable and just try to upsell.

Very frustrating. Unclear if moving back to AWS, or hosting our own Postgres, would help.

Could you elaborate a bit on the connectivity problems? What is your setup? CloudSQL Proxy, any loadbalancers?

[I'm the Cloud SQL TL] Note that we currently only support PostgreSQL 9.6. Obviously supporting major versions across both MySQL and PostgreSQL is a priority for us.

Hi, Craig from Citus here. If you're interested in Citus being available on other infrastructure provides aside from AWS as a fully managed service please feel free to reach out to me directly craig at citusdata.com.

We did, but now use https://aiven.io

Highly recommended if you want a fast and featured managed db service.

what's the benefit of using them vs. AWS or GCP directly?

Latest software (using v10.3), better performance (nvme SSDs), better backups (point in time, instant cloning), better features (more extensions, cross-region replication even across different clouds), better flexibility (migrate master across different clouds), better monitoring (logs and datadog metrics export), and more focused support with a smaller team.

AWS and GCP both have nvme SSDs for instance types intended for big-ol DBs

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ssd-inst...

Yes, I know. This thread is about managed database services, specifically about Aiven vs cloud-direct. Aiven still runs VMs on AWS or GCP but offers nvme disks while neither RDS nor CloudSQL have that available.

Ah I see, i3 isn’t in the RDS pool yet. I imagine it will be eventually?

It's way more expensive. Have you found ROI there ?

For our needs, yes. They run on cloud VMs so there will be a markup but their startup-4 and higher plans on GCP use local NVME SSDs so we get much better performance for the price.

We also make use of cross-regional replicas and are looking at doing it across clouds so if you want that then there isn't any other option other than doing it yourself. It's more of the complexity of this deployment rather than raw db size for us so if you have several TBs then maybe it's not the best fit.

Interesting. I'm curious how they compare to Citus and if there are any tight integrations with their over services (managed Kafka or Elasticsearch)

From the big players there's also Azure (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/postgresql/) and Amazon (https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/)

citus isn't simply postgresql. It has many tradeoffs

What do you mean? It's just an extension to PostgreSQL and runs anywhere that allows you to load it.

We get that, but I left off (for brevity) the reasons why Citus would be a net positive for our use case.

I would appreciate if you could list some of those differences and tradeoffs, for some of us who are interested in Citus but haven't yet had time to look at it in more detail. Thanks!