[pilif]

I am totally impressed by the work 2ndQuadrant is doing: many of the recent innovations to Postgres have been done by them and all of that without any obligation for them to be doing so. The BSD license would allow them to add all of these things to a proprietary fork that they could be selling.

Or they could just release their own fork under an open license and focus on just adding features.

But that's not how they work. All of their contributions are pushed upstream which is a very considerable effort with how conservative Postgres is at accepting new functionality.

Aside of that: there are 2ndQuadrant employees in the #postgres IRC chat room, helping people with daily support issues. This is their core business and yet they still help people for free (within reason). This is bloody impressive.

If I'm ever at a point when I need help with a Postgres issue, then they will be very first of the list of companies I would consider.

Thank you very much for all that you are doing.

[pgaddict]

While I do work for 2ndQuadrant and think that David did a very fine job on this great patch, it'd be a bit unfair not to mention this patch stands on parallel infrastructure built by EDB (and Robert Haas & Amit Kapila in particular) and others.

Kudos to them.

[sandGorgon]

I wish they would build a RDS alternative. I would use them in a heartbeat. There are all these companies/startups who are not in the target market for consulting... But who would gladly pay for hosted postgres.

[pilif]

Just a little heads-up: Postgres is very easy to run on your own and even in the default configuration runs well even for a considerable amount of users.

Over here, we only started to seriously thinking about what we're doing once we were handling in the order of 10K transactions per second.

Once you are at that level, you're probably going to need optimizations specific to your application and a generic database hoster might not be able to help you anyways.

I get that as a startup you don't have people for everything, but can you really afford to outsource the knowledge about the central piece of your application where all the value is stored at?

[sandGorgon]

I have a fairly sophisticated docker VM with wal-e, replication and everything running. Yes - I am aware of what you say.

Hosting the dB has never been the knowledge about central piece of application. you may disagree (and I respect that), but for me it has been similar to building a RAID-10 dedicated server vs using AWS.

You can argue that maintaining data resiliently is a critical part of the organization - but at what stage? In the first 3 years of a startup, you are iterating the product. You are pretty much agonizing over drop rates, conversion rates for every single minute of your life. The fact that data will crash NEEDS to come a distant second.

Dropbox has only just moved out of AWS. Storage was probably the most critical part of Dropbox, but it chose (rightly) to focus on customers first.

What you are talking about will come - but it will come after some time. And till then I would love to pay some postgres devs to run a hosted dB for me...like RDS.

[htn]

Please check out our Aiven (https://aiven.io). Managed & hosted pay-per-hour PostgreSQL that is available on GCE, AWS and DigitalOcean.

[sandGorgon]

Very cool! I would definitely use you guys once my aws credits run out. Quick suggestion - please make your pricing front and center. If you didn't tell me on HN, I would have dropped off on your home page. Check cloudways pricing page for a very similar business model pricing page.

[oskari]

We now have a full price list available, see https://aiven.io/postgresql#pricing for details. Thanks for the feedback!

[jpgvm]

If you don't mind hosting it yourself check out Flynn our pg appliance is very similar to how RDS is constructed. Or if you are more adventurous look at Joyent Manatee which the Flynn code is based off.

[sandGorgon]

But that is precisely what I want to avoid. For most startups at an early stage, what we are short of is people. It's the github vs self hosted argument - most people with limited people resources would default to github.

RDS is the most expensive thing we pay for. It's worth it.

[jpgvm]

Agreed, but the option is always nice. :)