Free Postgres databases for small projects • Hacker News Board

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#161

Post by Fabricio20 » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 2:29 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #126

KronisLV wrote: post #119

> A note about credit cards > Even for our free services, we require a credit card number. We know that's the worst and it gives you heartburn. It's not because we plan to charge you. > But here's what happens if you give people freemium full access to a hosting platform: lots and lots of free VMs mining for cryptocurrencies. > We could tell you we want to prevent crypto mining because we care about the planet, and t…

Wouldn't they be able to detect mining? And shut down that VM? I think many hosters would like to have that...

It's not just miners, you also have people using your free or even cheap tiers for DDOS/PortScan/SSH Bruteforce. These ones burn your IP address so it's better to prevent it than to try to catch it later. A credit card check goes a long way as a barrier to entry.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#162

Post by kasey_junk » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

chris_st wrote: post #144

tptacek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a sort of content-free comment, but I'll say it anyways because it's been gnawing at me for months --- there is a lot of content queued up for us to write about; just a freaking avalanche of stuff we've been working on. I keep looking for places to break it off and start writing about it, and the work keeps growing and foiling our attempts.

This isn't really a content-free comment -- you've let us know that you all are not sitting on your hands. Have you thought of hiring a technical writer? Think of it as a work-stealing algorithm if that helps :-)

If you click on the Twitter handle of one of the authors at the bottom of the article you’ll see they list their job as “technical writing at fly.io”.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#163

Post by pmarreck » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

mrkurt wrote: post #61

mooreds wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I'd rather run with a defined image, is there a way to do that? Here's the image: https://hub.docker.com/r/fusionauth/fusionauth-app/tags (supports ARM or x86). Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019258 shows, I think, how to do that.

Ah, for this you want "fly launch", it'll tell you it's going to generate a config file for you. Edit the config so the `internal_port` is right for the app you're running, then `fly deploy -i fusionauth/fusionauth-app` and you should be good.

What are your ARM plans, if any?

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#164

Post by kasey_junk » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 2:35 PM UTC

yakkomajuri wrote: post #154

This is awesome. One genuine question from someone with no context into their product: does Fly lock me in by barring access to WAL replication? This is something Heroku does that is extremely annoying as you'll grow and grow with them and one day you realize migrating the data will be a massive hassle.

You can run a bare Postgres (or any other db for that matter) app on fly with any settings you want. It won’t be wrapped in their nice cli command but it will work.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#165

Post by davnicwil » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

Really enjoying watching Fly develop. Not sure if I have read the strategy right, but my read is that they are going for an edge 'OS' which is compatible with the way software is already built for the centralised deployment model, where other players are going with a strategy of inventing a new 'OS' and saying, pretty much, 'all this edge goodness is available, but you have to rewrite your software to run on our OS first'.

I'm so glad to be seeing someone do this, because for a while it was looking like nobody would - and as long as nobody is doing it, nobody would have to.

Now with Fly increasing in popularity, you have to expect that others, Cloudflare in particular, must be seriously looking at integrating more 'centralised deployment' tools like postgres into their edge platform too (if, to be fair, they didn't already have this on their roadmap), providing more options and competition.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#166

Post by mrkurt » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 2:37 PM UTC

cornel_io wrote: post #124

mrkurt wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, you're not really missing anything, we just don't connect the dots very well. Install CLI, run `fly launch` in a directory with a Dockerfile, and it should just work. Most of our users don't start with a Docker image though, they start with Phoenix. What you're seeing is a little bit of indecisiveness in how we target the docs.

Out of curiosity, why target Phoenix users as your primary audience when you serve generic Docker users easily as well, given that they're likely a 10x or more segment? Are you just marketing to a tighter target audience to start, or is your platform/UI specifically optimized to support Phoenix?

We started with generic Docker! The Phoenix focus has been very helpful, though. Docker apps are incredibly broad, other than "it's really easy to launch a container", it's hard to define why we're especially good at Docker containers.

With Phoenix, we can say: run your fullstack Phoenix app on Fly and your users get sub 40ms responses from LiveView. When responses are that fast, you can write less code and still build really dynamic applications. And we can give those devs a really nice launch experience: https://twitter.com/chris_mccord/status/1468998944009166849

We're getting to the point where we can expand this focus. The infrastructure works great for many types of apps. The launch UX could be good for every full stack framework with enough people.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#167

Post by mrkurt » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 2:38 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #163

mrkurt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, for this you want "fly launch", it'll tell you it's going to generate a config file for you. Edit the config so the `internal_port` is right for the app you're running, then `fly deploy -i fusionauth/fusionauth-app` and you should be good.

What are your ARM plans, if any?

We have no ARM plans, but a strong desire. The really good ARM stuff is locked up within Apple and Amazon, though. I'm really hoping an independent chip vendor ships a compelling and broadly available ARM platform we can use for servers. They all keep killing their products. :/

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#168

Post by pmarreck » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

vlahmot wrote: post #24

tylerchr wrote: post #6

> We've had a free tier since we launched ten years ago (in 2020). I’m not a Fly.io customer (although more and more I am thinking I should be), but I eagerly read every new blog post because I’m so entertained by their tone. These people are clearly having fun at work.

I also like the frankness and simplicity of their communication style. No fancy buzzwords, to the point and speaks to things we all know are true but are typically not addressed or are wrapped up in spin. The first and last paragraphs are great examples. The authenticity of it leaves me with a strong sense of trust and respect.

I think you just inadvertently identified why any mention of "web3" makes me burp stomach acid

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#169

Post by tshanmu » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

love this - "Your credit card number is the thin plastic line between us and chaos."

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#170

Post by mrkurt » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

cxr wrote: post #147

lewisl9029 wrote: post #28

I'm so glad Fly exists. Every other edge focused thing out there I'm aware of are "serverless" which these days basically means they charge per request. That's fine for a lot of use cases, but the unit economics of the per request pricing model means it's really hard to operate a predictably sustainable (i.e. profitable) business without also charging our customers on a usage basis, or enforcing limits on usage, neit…

> it's really hard to operate a predictably sustainable (i.e. profitable) business [... with other providers]. Fly just gives us compute at the edge for a predictable price per unit of actual compute resources as opposed to requests, and gives us freedom to serve as much traffic as we can min-max onto those resources, like we could with traditional cloud compute The praise on the subject of predictability is interest…

We ended up shipping a "cap your costs" feature, we just did it with prepaid credits. If you buy prepaid credits instead of adding a credit card to your account, we can't bill you more than you've prepaid. The downside is that you have to prepay $25 to use anything at all.

My comment could have been better. Our business model is predicated on making it cheap to use services and easy to incrementally scale up. We probably won't build features to cap usage of things directly, but it makes total sense to deactivate apps when credits run out.