Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

elephantsql.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 125 posts

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#11

Post by robertlagrant »

a2800276 wrote: post #5
colesantiago wrote: post #3

This makes sense, but also not surprised. In today's world there are countless Postgres providers (Supabase, RDS, DigitalOcean, GCP, Azure, etc) so there is plenty of choice now. Although I don't see why anyone would choose niche providers today other than the cloud provided ones like RDS now.

Because RDS forces you to deal with the AWS behemouth instead if just changing your database connect parameters.

> Because RDS forces you to deal with the AWS behemouth instead if just changing your database connect parameters.

This is one of the things I quite liked about Azure, funnily enough. They basically give you a connection string. It's not ideal, and I think for production we did something slightly different with Azure identities, but it got us going quickly, and the identities thing devops just swapped in later behind the scenes. Other than that it was just regular Postgres.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#13

Post by theK »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #12

How does one handle a zero downtime migration in this case? On a database of 50gib+ is this a solved problem in Postgres world?

Isn't this just the typical case of changing DB hosts? You set up replication to new location and migrate apps to new location?

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#14

Post by chipdart »

darkstar_16 wrote: post #9

We've been a customer for long for some of out applications. It's a shame but I get their reasoning. The hosted postgresql market is getting crowded and it is difficult for a small shop to stand out.

I'm wondering why are they completely cutting off their hosted DB services instead of scaling it down. Is this something that's so time-consuming to provide at scale?

I'm also questioning their decision to put all their chips on message brokers. Don't those services require fast and reliable access that is only possible if they are provided as support services running within the same network? They seem to be the kind of service that only makes sense as a value-added service provided as part of a more general cloud hosting offering.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#15

Post by jpalomaki »

colesantiago wrote: post #3

This makes sense, but also not surprised. In today's world there are countless Postgres providers (Supabase, RDS, DigitalOcean, GCP, Azure, etc) so there is plenty of choice now. Although I don't see why anyone would choose niche providers today other than the cloud provided ones like RDS now.

one way to think: managing state (database) is hard. You need to manage replication, backups, version upgrades etc.

Compared to this, stateless application server part is usually quite easy. If you would like to be cost effective, with small team, you could outsource the database part and manage the applications on dedicated servers.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#17

Post by conradfr »

a2800276 wrote: post #4

What a shame. This is "cloud" as it ought to be: be clear about the service you provide, provide it well, no lock in. Simple and matter-of-factly. I just started evaluating them about a month ago, loved their hosted postgres and a couple of days later the EOL announcement poped up in my dashboard :(

The service is good but it was definitely not clear upfront about the postgresql version you were getting when selecting a region / provider.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#18

Post by justinclift »

theK wrote: post #13
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #12

How does one handle a zero downtime migration in this case? On a database of 50gib+ is this a solved problem in Postgres world?

Isn't this just the typical case of changing DB hosts? You set up replication to new location and migrate apps to new location?

In theory (!), yes.

It's something you'd need to trial though, perhaps a few times even.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#20

Post by swiftcoder »

a2800276 wrote: post #5
colesantiago wrote: post #3

This makes sense, but also not surprised. In today's world there are countless Postgres providers (Supabase, RDS, DigitalOcean, GCP, Azure, etc) so there is plenty of choice now. Although I don't see why anyone would choose niche providers today other than the cloud provided ones like RDS now.

Because RDS forces you to deal with the AWS behemouth instead if just changing your database connect parameters.

What? RDS supports username+password authentication for the database connection
Post reply on HN