Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eerikkivistik 516 days ago
While I do love Postgres and use it daily on AWS and Google Cloud, I will add that the managed Postgres on Google Cloud is a mess in some areas. For example they use some EOL extensions outdated for 10+ years (a specific example is GEOS) and refuse to update it and give no control for you to upgrade it either.
1 comments

I wonder where things will stand in 10 years from now. Will many orgs still be consuming vanilla Postgres, or will most workloads have shifted to ~proprietary implementations behind cloud services like "Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database" and "Google AlloyDB for PostgreSQL" due to unrivalled price-performance? In other words, can progress in OSS Postgres keep up with cloud economics or will things devolve into an even messier ecosystem centred purely around the wire protocol and SQL dialect?
Databases seem to grow much slower than other assets, so maybe this price advantage just won't be worth the vendor lockin. Hell my current extremely valuable postgres database worth literally millions of dollars is about thirteen gigs and could be hosted on my mac mini if I really wanted to. Still, the managed hosting is worth it—only without vendor lockin!
DBMS (and DBAs) tend to be more conservative, so extensions and implementations diverge much more slowly than, say, js.

There's also the incoming business argument in favor of not diverging too far from baseline.

If I'm AWS/Azure/GCP trying to attract a customer from a competitor service, 'completely rewrite your app to be able to use us' isn't a compelling pitch.

MS SQL Server and Oracle have different incentives, but the cloud services would probably prefer portability and decreased maintenance / fork support load.