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Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

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Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#51
post #46

"Serverless"...this word is so thrown around nowadays that it lost its original meaning. Same way the phrase "we're like a family" transitioned from a beloved one in 50's to its thrown away in 90's meaningless all the way to today be considered a red flag when you hear such a word at a hiring interview, the "serverless" word is in its late 90's nowadays. One decade and will become just another red flag.

The meaning is pretty clear: you don't manage compute, it scales up elastically based on demand, even all the way to zero. Ideally, it reacts quickly enough to changes in demand that you don't need to worry about it. Serverless is basically the original promise of the cloud.

It's not as clear as you think, because companies are watering it down. Just have a look what "serverless"-branded services AWS published the past years.

Take "OpenSearch Serverless" for example: They claim "you only pay for the resources consumed by the workload", but even if you have an OpenSearch Serverless collection you don't use, you pay at least ~$690/month (and that's not even accounting for stored data)!

https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/pricing/

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#52

What benefits does one get from using bit.io or other equivalents compared to the AWS built in Aurora? is their offering different and I'm just confused by the jargon?

It takes < 10 seconds to go from no account to database w/ bit.io

*took, as its shutting down

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#53
Damn, 30 days is quick. I found out about https://neon.tech but then quickly ran into a major bug, and then thankfully found out about bit.io, which is what I use for https://dittoed.app.

Looks like I will have to go back to neon (they fixed the bug).

If anyone has other ideas, I'm all ears. Project is hosted on Cloudflare and they have D1 now, but Dittoed uses a little bit of PostGIS.

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#54
This is interesting... possibly a move by Databricks to try and build on their "data lakehouse" concept to counter the recent "Fabric platform" announcements at MS Build.

Databricks coined the "Delta lake" concept and are still (just about) leading the way, but Fabric has the potential from MS to take away that marketshare. Databricks need to improve their "serverless SQL" offering, and add a serious "data warehouse" component alongside the lake.

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#55
post #53

Damn, 30 days is quick. I found out about https://neon.tech but then quickly ran into a major bug, and then thankfully found out about bit.io, which is what I use for https://dittoed.app . Looks like I will have to go back to neon (they fixed the bug). If anyone has other ideas, I'm all ears. Project is hosted on Cloudflare and they have D1 now, but Dittoed uses a little bit of PostGIS.

Neon sounds good for you. I'd wager any kind of managed database is fine, so the question is if you enjoy the features/cost savings Neon brings. Otherwise I cannot recommend using a managed DB enough because that's the best 20 bucks you're gonna spend.

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#56
post #18

Are there alternatives to the database service with similar API or is it leaving a gap in the market?

[disclosure: I'm the founder of Snaplet]

I think there are a lot of different reasons why people may want to use a service like bit.io, but if you want a database with data in it to code against, run tests against, reproduce production related data-bugs, and run e2e tests against then check out https://www.snaplet.dev.

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#57
post #41
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not this one though, they are open source so someone else would start to offer new hosted instances: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon Some Helm charts: https://github.com/neondatabase/helm-charts It could potentially be one of their partners: Vercel https://neon.tech/docs/guides/vercel Hasura https://neon.tech/docs/guides/hasura

> Some Helm charts: https://github.com/neondatabase/helm-charts For the record though, they're not enough to run neon today[0] - this has been a "problem" since neon was announced here[1]. [0]: https://github.com/neondatabase/helm-charts/issues/35#issue-... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31540691

I found their docker-compose more helpful than their chart: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/blob/main/docker-compos...

But I also needed to read their Ansible files to understand how they manage their infra better. Those are deleted now, but luckily you can just look at the history (commit that deleted it: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/commit/0d3d022eb1fe4a42...)

Re: Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io

#59
post #43

I haven't heard of either of those companies. I don't even fully understand what Databricks does. But it's clear that they have no problem shutting down a production database offering with 30 days notice, and have the gall to title this action "Investing in the Developer Experience". If this doesn't send a message that you shouldn't trust them with anything important, I don't know what would.

> what Databricks does

It's an ancient African word that means "I am because I can't install Apache Spark".

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