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ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

elephantsql.com

21–30 of 125 posts

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#21

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.

Supabase provides a lot of added value regarding tools and auth with SSO, so it’s more than just Postgres.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#22

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.

For analytics, the database can be anywhere and the niche providers offer multiplicative performance/cost gains.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#23
post #13

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?

From what the migration doc says, it will only support pgdump migration. Meaning it will require downtime, or at least write downtime. Create backup using pgdump, restore the dump to new database. While making sure no changes to the old db before switch over.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#24

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

gov.uk did a good writeup of their 11 second migration of a 400gb database with ~1000 read/writes per second:

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2024/01/17/how-we-migrated-our-postg...

With their approach, there would always be a minimum of 1 second downtime from the DNS changeover.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#25
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would argue there is limited/no market for Database as a Service where the database isn’t hosted on the same cloud provider and region as your application. Egress costs way too much for that. So you’d assume most people are already dealing with the AWS behemoth. And if the cloud provider is providing a competing Database as a Service then it’s almost impossible to compete.

Egress costs are only expensive if you're paying the artificially high mega cloud corp's inflated pricing. I've yet to pay for bandwidth for any servers on Hetzner or for Cloudflare's services.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#26
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 :(

Absolutely. I’ve been a customer for many years and it’s always been a pleasure to interact with such a simple, transparent and “to the point” UI. The fact that they are a tiny team also bumps it up the list for me.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#27
Given how many different companies now offering hosted Postgres it must be a challenging market to compete in.

People get dragged into the big cloud when they start using one service or the other, moving the database if for no other reason than to minimize latency seems smart.

I do agree with other people on here that dealing with a laser focused independent company is far preferable than big cluod.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#28

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.

Supabase provides a lot of added value regarding tools and auth with SSO, so it’s more than just Postgres.

https://itsjustpostgres.com

;)

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#29

Any strong alternatives?

There's quite a few places around. Also Ubicloud look interesting, though I've not personally used them: https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql

Primary architect of Ubicloud PostgreSQL here. Thanks a lot for shout out!

I'd be happy to answer if anyone has any questions about our managed service.

Re: ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down

#30
post #26
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 :(

Absolutely. I’ve been a customer for many years and it’s always been a pleasure to interact with such a simple, transparent and “to the point” UI. The fact that they are a tiny team also bumps it up the list for me.

well, they shut this down probably because they cannot afford to keep a product that bring little revenue. I never heard of AWS retiring a product (I am excluding ancient stuff like VPC classic and SimpleDB, both had an upgrade path to something superior)
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