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by lysecret 948 days ago
The serverless pitch is extremely appealing to many companies. Also, many serverless offerings seem like a great choice at the beginning. But at some point, you will want SQL features like joins, groups, secondary indexes, foreign keys etc.

The missing link is really a serverless postgres (which many are working on but nothing has impressed me so far.
2 comments
2mol 948 days ago
Sorry if this is ignorant, but I never understand what serverless Postgres means. What's different from a hosted Postgres instance? Some scaling characteristics or the fact you interact with it via an API instead of some library, ORM, or plain SQL?
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dspillett 948 days ago
Serverless in that context essentially means “somebody else's server(farm)”. It frees you from some of the infrastructure/admin involved in server sizing & upgrades, backups, availability management, and so on.

It can be very attractive to teams who don't want to have an internal expert for all that, or to buy huge hardware to deal with spikes in activity that only happen occasionally⁰. Just being able to spin up a large DB for some tests without worrying about available space, how much it will compete for this like CPU/IO with your other DBs¹, etc, can be very convenient.

It can work out quite expensive in terms of price/performance ratio, if those factors are not a benefit to you.

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[0] or happen regularly but usually for only a short time

[1] usually these things are capped, or have a burstable cap, so “noisy neighbours”² are not the huge problem they can often be on cheap shared hosting

[2] unless you have explicitly pooled resources (like Elastic Pools for Azure SQL) without per-object limits, in which case your own activity could be harmful noise

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leetrout 948 days ago
A lot of "serverless" things are really on-demand timesharing.

One example of "serverless postgres" in my opinion would mean data is on a blob store and you only pay when running queries and for the static storage.

Basically snowflake's pricing model.

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ako 948 days ago
Serverless = not having to think of server size for running the database, it scales as needed.
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Dave3of5 948 days ago
> The missing link is really a serverless postgres

Used AWS Aurora Serverless v2 (MySQL) and it worked pretty good actually never used the postgres version but it's now available.

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