Reliability: It’s not great

Very interesting to see Kurt assert theyre going to "solve managed Postgres", and I'm super curious to know what that means. Does it mean something like RDS, or more like CrunchyData?

I could see them building something RDS-like on their own, but if they're trying to go further than that I wonder if they'll buy or partner with other companies rather than doing it themselves. Neon strikes me as a Postgres-as-a-service that could pair well with Fly.

That comment jumped out to me too, my recollection was that they've been pretty vocal about that not being something they wanted to solve themselves as a core competency. I'm not quite parsing if these two blurbs should still be taken together or if the second sentence is refuting the first.

> The second problem we have with Postgres was a poor choice on my part. We decided to ship “unmanaged Postgres” to buy ourselves time to wait for the right managed Postgres provider to show up.

> We’re going to solve managed Postgres. It’s going to take a while to get there, but it’s a core component of the infrastructure stack and we can’t afford to pretend otherwise.

+1 to Neon seeming like a good fit, but it's also very much a beta (alpha?) both as a product and company (at least from my impression). I'm not sure that's a bet they'd want to make right now given the context of this post.

Craig here from Crunchy Data. Not sure if you mean Crunchy Data is like RDS or isn't, in some cases we're very similar as a managed service provider. But are focused on a better developer experience and quality support.

We've had a number of customers that use us for the database and fly for the app. We had a user benchmark a number of heroku alternatives with various database providers and we were actually better response time than the unmanaged instances on fly themselves in addition to all other providers they tested - https://webstack.dancroak.com/

I won't speak for Fly, but we're big fans of them and think we pair quite well together.

Yes we think they pair well together too. I believe the ball is in your court though. ;)

<3

I don't even understand what you mean as the difference between "something like RDS" and "something like CrunchyData" -- they seem like similar products to me?

I haven't used CrunchyData for work, but I see you as offering what RDS does plus plenty more. RDS does a lot, but after using Timescale Cloud professionally I saw how much RDS doesn't do, like actually-simple upgrades, one-click forks, etc. and Crunchy looks similar in going beyond RDS.

I think the community would really love to see a direct Fly+Crunchy integration!

I see RDS as the absolute bare minimum for a managed database; providers like Timescale or Crunchy tend to add some pretty useful stuff on top.

If I was in their shoes I'd probably aim for a "serverless" Postgres experience where you get a connection string and you know nothing else.

I think RDS, Crunchy, Aiven and others aren't quite there yet.

(Neon CEO)

We are launching our paid tier March 15th and will be production ready shortly after. We are running 20K+ databases and measuring reliability and uptime.

Generally reliability is a function of architecture (we are solid there), good SRE practices, and a long tail of event you live through, fix, and make sure they never happen again. The bigger the fleet the faster the learning.

For my own curiosity, I am interested in hearing what features Crunchy adds on top that RDS doesn't have, that folks find pretty useful!

(Timescale -- I think i know, it adds features specifically about storing time series? But I don't think crunchy has additional domain-specific stuff like this? What are the pretty useful features folks find in crunchy that RDS lacks?)

They kind of offer that with their Redis (via Upstash). But for our use-case, we needed it to be managed PG and Redis. Going out of the LAN introduces too much latency.

Upstash Redis for Fly runs on Fly infrastructure and we observe latencies in the low single digit milliseconds.

Maybe that is what Fly had in mind: That some company like Upstash would bring "managed" serverless Postgres to their platform.

Unless somebody natively implements clustering in Postgres I don't see that happening anytime soon, all existing tools require way too many moving parts.

I don't know why they'd even want Postgres for the type of service they are offering, KV or maybe SQLite seem like a better fit.

That's great, love to hear it! Really excited about what you all are working on.

Looking forward to it!