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Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by claytonjy on Monday March 06, 2023 @02:27PM (#35046327)
Very interesting to see Kurt assert theyre going to "solve managed Postgres", and I'm super curious to know what that means. Does it mean something like RDS, or more like CrunchyData?

I could see them building something RDS-like on their own, but if they're trying to go further than that I wonder if they'll buy or partner with other companies rather than doing it themselves. Neon strikes me as a Postgres-as-a-service that could pair well with Fly.

Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by mmcclure on Monday March 06, 2023 @02:35PM (#35046437)
That comment jumped out to me too, my recollection was that they've been pretty vocal about that not being something they wanted to solve themselves as a core competency. I'm not quite parsing if these two blurbs should still be taken together or if the second sentence is refuting the first.

> The second problem we have with Postgres was a poor choice on my part. We decided to ship “unmanaged Postgres” to buy ourselves time to wait for the right managed Postgres provider to show up.

> We’re going to solve managed Postgres. It’s going to take a while to get there, but it’s a core component of the infrastructure stack and we can’t afford to pretend otherwise.

+1 to Neon seeming like a good fit, but it's also very much a beta (alpha?) both as a product and company (at least from my impression). I'm not sure that's a bet they'd want to make right now given the context of this post.

Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by nikita on Monday March 06, 2023 @04:09PM (#35047625)
(Neon CEO)

We are launching our paid tier March 15th and will be production ready shortly after. We are running 20K+ databases and measuring reliability and uptime.

Generally reliability is a function of architecture (we are solid there), good SRE practices, and a long tail of event you live through, fix, and make sure they never happen again. The bigger the fleet the faster the learning.

Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by mmcclure on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @02:28AM (#35052580)
That's great, love to hear it! Really excited about what you all are working on.
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by jorangreef on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @04:29AM (#35053375)
Looking forward to it!
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by craigkerstiens on Monday March 06, 2023 @02:57PM (#35046733)
Craig here from Crunchy Data. Not sure if you mean Crunchy Data is like RDS or isn't, in some cases we're very similar as a managed service provider. But are focused on a better developer experience and quality support.

We've had a number of customers that use us for the database and fly for the app. We had a user benchmark a number of heroku alternatives with various database providers and we were actually better response time than the unmanaged instances on fly themselves in addition to all other providers they tested - https://webstack.dancroak.com/

I won't speak for Fly, but we're big fans of them and think we pair quite well together.

Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by mrkurt on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:00PM (#35046765)
Yes we think they pair well together too. I believe the ball is in your court though. ;)
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by winslett on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:05PM (#35046830)
<3
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by claytonjy on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:53PM (#35047419)
I haven't used CrunchyData for work, but I see you as offering what RDS does plus plenty more. RDS does a lot, but after using Timescale Cloud professionally I saw how much RDS doesn't do, like actually-simple upgrades, one-click forks, etc. and Crunchy looks similar in going beyond RDS.

I think the community would really love to see a direct Fly+Crunchy integration!

Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by jrochkind1 on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:09PM (#35046890)
I don't even understand what you mean as the difference between "something like RDS" and "something like CrunchyData" -- they seem like similar products to me?
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by claytonjy on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:54PM (#35047434)
I see RDS as the absolute bare minimum for a managed database; providers like Timescale or Crunchy tend to add some pretty useful stuff on top.
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by jrochkind1 on Monday March 06, 2023 @04:40PM (#35048048)
For my own curiosity, I am interested in hearing what features Timescale or Crunchy add on top that RDS doesn't have, that folks find pretty useful!
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by aeyes on Monday March 06, 2023 @04:07PM (#35047601)
If I was in their shoes I'd probably aim for a "serverless" Postgres experience where you get a connection string and you know nothing else.

I think RDS, Crunchy, Aiven and others aren't quite there yet.

Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by chime on Monday March 06, 2023 @05:41PM (#35048815)
They kind of offer that with their Redis (via Upstash). But for our use-case, we needed it to be managed PG and Redis. Going out of the LAN introduces too much latency.
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by chronark on Monday March 06, 2023 @05:44PM (#35048855)
Upstash Redis for Fly runs on Fly infrastructure and we observe latencies in the low single digit milliseconds.
Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by aeyes on Monday March 06, 2023 @06:28PM (#35049347)
Maybe that is what Fly had in mind: That some company like Upstash would bring "managed" serverless Postgres to their platform.

Unless somebody natively implements clustering in Postgres I don't see that happening anytime soon, all existing tools require way too many moving parts.

I don't know why they'd even want Postgres for the type of service they are offering, KV or maybe SQLite seem like a better fit.