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Free Postgres databases for small projects

fly.io

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Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#221

Post by mrkurt »

js4ever wrote: post #120
mrkurt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an attempt to reduce friction. Developers try services like ours out for fun before they use them in anger. Putting a price on the fun stuff keeps people from trying it. It's not that $6.88/mo is too much, it's that >$0/mo is too much for developers who are used to their side projects being subsidized by monopolies or VCs. People spend a lot of money on infrastructure when they use it in anger. Free apps cost us…

How is it possible that free apps cost you $0.50/mo, the ipv4 alone worth more than that

I forgot about the IP addresses, those are not cheap. But we own a bunch and can optimize that cost away really easily too. :)

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#222

Post by nextaccountic »

mrkurt wrote: post #187
nextaccountic wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, talking about friction.. in your pricing page you say https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/#managed-ssl-certificates > Managed SSL certificates > We use Lets Encrypt to issue certificates, and donate half of our SSL fees to them at the end of each calendar year. > Single hostname certificates > Free for the first 10 > $0.10/mo for additional certificates > Wildcard certificates: $2/mo So, if my pet project needs a…

The infrastructure to manage and distribute certificates is pretty complicated, and doing support for certificate issues is expensive. This is why we bill for them. More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22624262 For people who need a whole bunch of certificates, the price hasn't been an issue. The problem with services that are free at any scale is that there's never an incentive to make them any go…

Fair enough. Indeed I didn't consider support costs. Thank you for your answer!

Actually let me ask another thing. Your FAQ mentions you're considering hosting CockroachDB as a drop-in distributed replacement for PostgreSQL [0], and also you currently offer a distributed, eventually consistent PostgreSQL replication solution [1].

Is either Tikv [2] (distributed key-value store) or Tidb [3] (distributed database with a mysql interface, built on top of Tikv) on your radar?

You already offer Redis as a key-value store, but Tikv has an amazing property: it ensures strong consistency globally (not eventual consistency). Tidb, being built on top of Tikv, also has strong consistency.

[0] https://fly.io/blog/fly-answers-questions/#q-what-is-fly-doi...

[1] https://fly.io/blog/globally-distributed-postgres/

[2] https://github.com/tikv/tikv

[3] https://github.com/pingcap/tidb

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#223

Post by errantmind »

IMO, small projects most often do not need a database. It is much simpler to serialize to a binary encoding and read/write to disk. I have several small projects, even some with > 100GB of data, that use this approach and it is very nice. I even have login/out without storing user data at all (yes, it is possible).

..The primary exception to this being if you absolutely have to normalize your data (with key constraints), or need the transactional guarantees of a database.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#224

Post by Jamie9912 »

tptacek wrote: post #89
Jamie9912 wrote: post #85

>1. Install Flyctl - you'll need it. Hmm.. not sure if I want to install something to use this.

If you prefer, you can build it from source. https://github.com/superfly/flyctl

No, i mean, what's wrong with having a webui? Digitalocean, Linode, Vultr, Upcloud, nothing requires you to have something installed. Why is Fly io different?

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#225

Post by ignoramous »

mrkurt wrote: post #201
gfd wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one _actually_ offers unlimited bandwidth. Isn't cloudflare's whole shtick about not having egress fees? https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-now-even-more-unbound/

Cloud Flare's model is to give you "unlimited" bandwidth with restrictions on how you can use it. If you do any kind of volume you quickly get a call from a sales person who wants to sell you enterprise. And then you end up paying a relatively high per-GB price as one big enterprise contract. They're reasonably transparent about this, and I think it's fair. It's just not how I prefer to buy services. At no point will…

We are pushing xxTBs every month at this point, and I haven't got the call yet. I'd have to spend $yyyy dollars on Fly.io for that kind of bandwidth. By simply moving to Unbound last month, we even halved our bills, and with some planned software changes, bills should go down another 30%. Besides, Matthew Prince says pushing higher bandwidth via Workers is fair game [0].

That said, I very much prefer Fly.io to AWS for workloads not suitable for Workers... and in just these past 3 months, we committed eng resources to make sure Workers workloads can run on Fly.io too, if and when the time comes for an instant migration.

We also run workloads on AWS AppRunner and Amazon Lightsail Containers and that's only because S3 EC2 bandwidth is ~$0. We'd definitely move to R2 once Cloudflare opens it up, and we hope, eventually, Fly.io reaches the scale to peer directly with Cloudflare DCs for lower latencies, if nothing else.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791660

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#226

Post by byhemechi »

Jamie9912 wrote: post #224
tptacek wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you prefer, you can build it from source. https://github.com/superfly/flyctl

No, i mean, what's wrong with having a webui? Digitalocean, Linode, Vultr, Upcloud, nothing requires you to have something installed. Why is Fly io different?

i don't work for fly so i'm not exactly an authority but as someone with quite a bit of cli experience i can get something done 50x quicker than with a webui. there's added bonuses too, you can use cli programs in ci build tasks.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#227

Post by welterde »

tptacek wrote: post #212
mike_d wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bad, it was v6 UDP I was thinking of? I'm a big fan of Fly and have one medium-sized app deployed to it. Just waiting on this specific issue before deploying more: https://community.fly.io/t/allow-non-root-users-to-write-to-...

You're not crazy! We still don't do v6 UDP (there's no good reason for us not to, but it'll be a week of rebuilding a BPF engine while the plane's still in the air, so this task never hits the top of our stack and won't until someone really pressures us on it). Full honesty! That's how we roll on HN. :)

That's such a shame. Would have been a no-brainer for an anycasted authoritative dns setup otherwise.

Hope you get around to it soon!

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#228

Post by nerdyadventurer »

mrkurt wrote: post #191
ignoramous wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every other edge focused thing out there I'm aware of are "serverless" which these days basically means they charge per request. Workers Unbound is $1 for ~6.6M requests (+ runtime at $0.0000015 per sec / $12.5 for 1M GB-sec). That's super cheap considering free egress, which brings me to... > Fly just gives us compute at the edge for a predictable price per unit of actual compute resources as opposed to requests..…

We don't bill for internal Postgres bandwidth anymore. Bandwidth in general is a good point though. No one _actually_ offers unlimited bandwidth. We haven't figured out how to be transparent about bandwidth costs AND check that box for people yet, though.

Is pricing page updated according this news, seems not to me?

Can I please also know how PG clusters are run at the edge? Docs is not very informative about how things work under the hood(ie. infrastructure / deployment).

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#230

Post by pmarreck »

mrkurt wrote: post #167
pmarreck wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :/

Are they killing their products due to lack of demand (which seems odd, given the cost/benefit), too much competition from Amazon, running out of money vs. ramping up sales, or??

I just googled and it looks like the Ampere Altra is shipping in some rackmount configs? (Vaporware?)

https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/Rack-Server?fid=2326,222...

https://www.avantek.co.uk/ such as https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-altra-mt-jade.html

https://amperecomputing.com/reference-platforms/

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