
Fully managed PostgreSQL databases - alexellisuk
https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases/
======
gr2020
Love this new offering. What I don’t love is they are charging for egress
bandwidth ($0.01/GB), even in the same data center [1]. I can understand it
for outbound to internet or other data centers, but this is hard to swallow
for the same facility.

Hopefully DO will reconsider this!

It also makes me wonder if all access to these databases is via the public
network. I’m guessing so.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/1096087824066101248](https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/1096087824066101248)

~~~
eddiezane
To clarify here and from the launch blog post [0].

> Ingress bandwidth is always free, and egress fees ($0.01/GB per month) will
> be waived for 2019.

In other words, we're not charging while we build this out.

0: [https://blog.digitalocean.com/announcing-managed-
databases-f...](https://blog.digitalocean.com/announcing-managed-databases-
for-postgresql/)

~~~
gr2020
Well, while I appreciate you coming here to clarify, and waiving charges for
2019 sounds nice, there’s nothing in that post that says those charges won’t
come into effect for the long term.

I guess I personally would want more color on that whole post-2019 egress
situation before committing to using the service. That’s just me, though!

~~~
andyfleming
It's not just you. Paying for egress within the same DC/vendor seems crazy to
me.

Edit: It sounds like that might not be the case though. Eddiezane said "We do
not plan to charge for private network / VPC traffic."

------
clarkevans
As of Wed, Jul 11, 2018, Digital Ocean Support has said there is no HIPAA
compliance[1]. I hope this has changed.

 _DigitalOcean is very interested HIPAA and has been exploring the
requirements to become compliant. As of right now, we are not HIPAA compliant
and unfortunately, we don 't have a public ETA I can share with you. If
DigitalOcean is still useful for segments of your infrastructure needs, we're
happy to answer any additional questions you have about our platform, but at
this time cannot provide a BAA for this purpose._

[1] [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-
digita...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-digital-
ocean-provide-baa-certificates-for-hipaa-compliance)

EDIT: I'm delighted to hear that DO will sign HIPAA agreements, but I'm unable
to find any documentation of this on your website.

EDIT: Since I got down-voted for pointing out a fact from your website, I've
added the link and the quote.

~~~
jofe
No downvotes intended (new HN account, so I can't even downvote yet :))! It
was a good question and a great call out.

I'll talk to the team about getting a click through BAA process in-place,
perhaps somewhere in the control panel. Right now they tend to be executed
once our customer success team gets engaged.

I did post an update to the thread you linked.

~~~
coupdejarnac
That's good news, thanks.

------
SnowingXIV
> Free daily backups with point-in-time recovery Your data is critical.

> That’s why we ensure it’s backed up every day. Restore data to any point
> within the previous seven days.

Seems very similar to Heroku's model at that price. Which is actually pretty
fair. I'm so happy to see DO doing this because there is always part of me
worried that if Heroku were to go out of business, change their pricing model,
start dipping in reliability that I'd be stuck spending a bunch more hours on
dev ops instead of focusing on development.

More quality competition is great to keep Heroku on their toes (though I've
had nothing but love for them).

~~~
tpetry
They state (1) free daily backups and (2) restore to any datapoint within the
previous seven days.

But if they only create a backup once a day i can only restore to any point in
time before the last full backup. Did they mean the constantly backup the
postgres WAL files so effectively you have backups only a few minutes old?

~~~
nextweek2
They are probably doing log shipping or even streaming replication:

[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/warm-
standby.html](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/warm-standby.html)

Sending all changes to another machine and they can be applied in the event of
a failure of the primary node. The backup process allows you to truncate the
logs up to the point of the backups.

------
avitzurel
I really love seeing what DO is doing.

We use a lot of providers, and seeing DO making this available while
immediately making the API available is really impressive.

A company that thinks about API first when enabling a new service (like
Amazon) enables real developers.

In comparison, we use CircleCI and often you wait for months for features to
be available through the API.

~~~
IgorPartola
Have they fixed their IPv6 support yet?

~~~
markovbot
Last i checked, they still issue a single IPv6 address to each droplet (eg a
/128, not a /64) and silently block certain ports on IPv6, so no.

~~~
IgorPartola
Well, I guess they will continue not getting my money then.

~~~
jbrooksuk
Can someone explain the significance of this?

~~~
jagger27
It's basically a non-standard use of IPv6, which is to ideally issue a /64 to
each end point. Personally I don't mind, but some people think they need
18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses per host.

The idea being with all those addresses you can create subrouters to manage
your network topology. Unless you're doing some weird tunnelling setup through
your VPS, I can't see why you'd need or want such a huge block.

People complain about only getting a /64 on their home routers.

Blocking certain outbound traffic is another matter: that really stinks.

------
thosakwe
This is actually some of the best news I could have received. I’m a recovering
NoSQL user who’s currently working on an app that I hope to eventually grow to
scale... I just don’t have experience managing clusters manually, so I’d
honestly be more than willing to pay for auto-management.

~~~
chimen
Why is everyone concerned with scaling databases and clustering before even
launching?

~~~
AYBABTME
DBs are great when everything works fine, but then when it stops working fine
for whatever reason, your hair are on fire and you end up having to learn real
quick a whole lot of stuff about your DB... then you wish:

\- You had learned and practiced this stuff ahead of time; or,

\- Had paid someone to do it for you, so you can focus on your core business.

~~~
chimen
Focusing prematurely on scaling and replication is the exact opposite of
"focusing on your core business". The only thing that I always recommend in
terms of databases is having a backup system in place. When need be and you're
one of those 1% that needs scaling, aws, google and azure are there for a warm
welcome.

~~~
macintux
Making sure that scaling is practical for the platform(s) you choose is not
the same as focusing your efforts on premature scaling.

------
rawrmaan
Wow, I thought this was gonna be cheaper than Heroku Postgres by a lot, but
really it’s only slightly cheaper in terms of CPU/mem, and actually more
expensive in terms of storage. Would love to see someone benchmark the two
offerings for comparisons, especially disk speed.

~~~
tnolet
Heroku's ecosystem around their Postgres offering is pretty advanced. It will
certainly take a lot of time for DO to even catch up to this.

~~~
emilsedgh
Can you elaborate a bit more about that? What does "advance" mean in this
case?

Right now our apps are deployed on Heroku but our Postgres is RDS. We didnt
want to plan long term on Heroku. And I don't even know if that makes sense.

So I've been always wondering about RDS vs. Heroku Postgres.

~~~
tnolet
Hard to put into words except for "it just works". But let me try:

\- The CLI / toolbelt is pretty amazing. You can do all sorts of analysis
right in your terminal.

\- The upgrading/crossgrading is pretty easy to.

\- Attaching multiple, different apps is really nicely done.

\- Extra, third party, services can tap into the logs and give you full
insight into what the hell is going on.

The experience is really good, because there is no "experience". It gets out
of your way and feels really robust and reliable.

~~~
mping
Indeed; don't forget the follower databases (read replicas that can be
upgraded to master).

~~~
smallgovt
RDS has read replicas and a process to promote to master that's just as easy
as Heroku.

------
alexellisuk
I wrote a blog post showing off the service here and just did a live demo
capturing GitHub data into Postgres. Check it out for some screenshots and to
find out more [https://www.openfaas.com/blog/serverless-single-page-
app/](https://www.openfaas.com/blog/serverless-single-page-app/)

------
eddiezane
Eddie from the DigitalOcean DevRel team here. Over the moon to get this in
everyone's hands. Here to answer what I can.

~~~
avolcano
I have to say, I'm extremely disappointed by the pricing. It doesn't seem any
cheaper than AWS's managed SQL offering (through Lightsail), nor cheaper than
Cloud SQL.

I'm trying to run a side project at a low rate, which is usually why I go to
DigitalOcean - it's much cheaper, than, say, spinning up a bunch of Heroku
dynos. In fact, I just moved a project from Heroku to DO to go from a $14/mo
hosting bill to $5/mo on the cheapest VPS.

My one problem has been Postgres - I don't want to self-manage a database.
However, Cloud SQL is ~$9/mo at the cheapest, and RDS/Lightsail are both
$15/mo at the cheapest. I'd really been hoping that DO would provide a lower-
cost alternative.

I'm really sad that the pricing structure doesn't bring managed databases down
to hobby-tier. I don't even want a free offering; I'm happy to pay gig of
space for $5/mo to run in perpetuity, with restrictions on backup retention or
something.

Right now, if I'm an actual startup or even bootstrapped company with money, I
see _zero_ reason to use DO's offering over your more-established competitors,
and as a hobbyist user, I can't justify spending money on it for a no-income
side project.

~~~
bpicolo
At the point you care about backups and standby nodes, you're already sort of
outside the cheapo hobby tier.

As for getting the $5/month option: Digitalocean Droplets have a 1-click Dokku
install, and you can use [https://github.com/dokku/dokku-
postgres](https://github.com/dokku/dokku-postgres) to instantly pop up a
postgres instance.

~~~
avolcano
That's kind of fair. I've been doing some thinking since posting this, and
I've been sort of debating what a "reasonable $5/mo version" of this would be.
The more I think about what managed database services usually entail, the more
I concede that my original request probably isn't really a viable product
(unless it was a "free tier"-style loss leader). Like, disk space and
bandwidth aren't really the primary cost involved.

I think what I really want is managed backups that live outside of my box, and
the ability quickly restore from one if my database crashes or becomes
unusable. I think automated failover to another node may not be a reasonable
ask for such a cheap product.

Of course, at that point: I could spin up a 1GB DigitalOcean volume for
$0.10/mo, and set up scripts to run `pg_dump` every couple hours, clean the
volume of older backups to free up space, and ideally a script to reset the
database to a given volume. _That's all stuff I don't want to do_, but maybe
someone's built a reusable set of scripts for it or something - that Dokku
container is promising as a starting point, though I'm a little annoyed it
only works with S3(-compatible).

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
Dokku is a management platform kinda like a self-hosted Heroku.

I've used it instead of Flynn in the past with a lot of success.

Edit: If S3 is the problem, backup to a minio instance on your dokku
([https://github.com/slypix/minio-dokku](https://github.com/slypix/minio-
dokku))

~~~
avolcano
I suppose I could also use DO's Spaces, which is S3-compatible, though also
has an annoying minimum (I do not need the 250 gigs you get for $5/mo)
[https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/](https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/)

------
danpalmer
With Kubernetes and managed Postgres, under the wonderful Digital Ocean UX and
product design, I’m keen to try this on personal projects.

That said, I do wonder who the pricing is targeted at.

Our database primary is around the same price as the highest spec DO are
offering, but for that we get 3x memory, 6x CPU, and 2x the disk.

For some things there are definitely huge benefits to using a hosted product,
Jenkins for example costs us a fortune in engineering time. Postgres though is
fairly straightforward for a simple setup, requires little ongoing
maintenance, and scales well to bigger boxes without much work.

I can see spending up to $100 a month of this perhaps, but for the ~day it
might take to set up Postgres on $50 of hardware with twice the performance, I
can’t see going much further beyond that. Equally, higher up the scale, the
top end is not that high performance for ~$2500 a month. The point in time
backups is fantastic, but I’m not sure how necessary they are for most
customers, over a standard Postgres hot replica setup.

------
howinator
This looks pretty sweet.

With that said, I seriously think they're missing an opportunity by not
offering GPUs. If DO offered a product similar to PaperSpace, basically a
dead-simple GPU to connect to your notebook, I don't think small teams would
need to look anywhere else for their cloud computing needs.

~~~
hacknat
GPUs are on the product roadmap at DO.

~~~
howinator
oh - are they? I read this [1] blog post a couple weeks ago which has no
mention of GPUs.

[1] [https://blog.digitalocean.com/whats-new-
for-2019/](https://blog.digitalocean.com/whats-new-for-2019/)

------
petercooper
Full list of extensions and versions off of a live instance:
[https://gist.github.com/peterc/e4f7a288ed0eb7e4ffe2d8383a086...](https://gist.github.com/peterc/e4f7a288ed0eb7e4ffe2d8383a086306)

Interesting to note that TimescaleDB is installed by default.

~~~
NewsAware
Thanks for the heads up, good news indeed!

------
sjroot
DigitalOcean keeps knocking it out of the park with this and other offerings.
I plan on migrating to their platform at some point, but wish they offered a
free/hobbyist tier (something like what is offered by Heroku) for exploring
ideas before committing to that price point.

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
The $5/mo is billed continuously by the hour, and you can store snapshots for
$0.05/GB/mo. Basically, throw a few bucks on an account and you can do a lot
of exploring so long as you shut down the droplets when you're not using them.

Personally I like the idea of putting up a bit of play money at first vs. the
prospect of higher recurring charges for a site that doesn't sleep.

------
clvx
Ok, I do love this feature because it fits perfectly with the kubernetes
offering. It's getting easier to manage things in Digital Ocean k8s.

------
jason_slack
I love DO.

However, in this case, it would cost me at least $800/mo. That $9,600/yr can
buy a lot of hardware/upgrades.

~~~
durandal1
For most businesses, people cost way more than hardware.

~~~
jason_slack
Sure, if you run dedicated PostgreSQL hardware you also need someone to
maintain it (probably).

------
strig
Any chance of a cheaper, low-performance tier for hobby projects? I was hoping
to see something at $5/mo like the the lowest droplet tier.

~~~
Max_aaa
I guess for hobby projects, you can run your DB on the 5 USD droplet.

~~~
strig
Well yeah, of course. I was hoping they would offer something managed to
compete with Heroku's free/$9 tiers, but this is the cost of three droplets
and isn't worth it for me at the moment. I'll probably test it out for a bit
though but it will be too expensive for hobby/throwaway projects.

~~~
tracker1
As mentioned in another thread, may want to consider dokku with the postgres
plugin.

~~~
strig
Sounds cool, I'll check it out.

------
kyledrake
It costs $100/mo minimum to get failover support, pretty high for a starter
package. That's a high end laptop a year to get a low-performance database
with one standby and a daily backup.

------
a_c
How does DO compared with heroku and RDS in terms of price, AZs, APIs and etc?
And what is the vertical scaling process like (don't seem to find anything on
a quick google search)?

------
tango12
Love it. The experience for creating is great as usual (for DO).

I really like the built-in pgbouncer, easy to configure connection pooling
thing too!

[https://i.imgur.com/zcS6a3a.png](https://i.imgur.com/zcS6a3a.png)

------
JonoBB
Not sure if I'm missing something here, but the pricing seems quite high (in
relation to DO's other products and competition).

For example, if we take 8GB ram node, that's $120 p/m. Add in 2 standby nodes,
and we add another £160 p/m. That equates to $280 per month.

AWS RDS, by comparison, is about $260 p/m for an rds.m5.large instance (also
8GB ram) on multi AZ. This can be reduced further via reserved instances.

Admittedly, the DO has more processing power, but all-in-all, I don't get this
pricing at all. I was very excited about this, but the pricing is putting on
the brakes.

------
chx
It is good to see cheap managed PostgreSQL getting steam. Back in 2006, the
startup I was with moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL because the support we were
able to find was both expensive (300 USD/hr) and not satisfactory. Back then
MySQL AB (this was before Sun) gave us a 10K two year deal on three servers
and they had excellent response times and knowledgeable support. So for a long
time I was biased against PostgreSQL because of support. It's time to put that
to rest :)

------
wolco
I love DO. Personally I don't understand the pricing/appeal over getting a 5
dollar droplet and setting yourself up with automated daily backups on the
droplet instance.

~~~
joekrill
Well there's the standby nodes with automated failover, and the fact that
maintenance and security are fully handled. For a lot of people that's well
worth the extra $10 a month. Plus setting up daily backups is one thing, but
verifying that it is done correctly and that they are easy to restore is
almost always skipped "until it's needed", which of course is too late.

------
jxcl
How do I see the detailed pricing of this offering if I don't have an account?
I want to know what $15/mo gets me before I decide whether I want to sign up.

------
yannovitch
Sweet, but personally, I very much prefer to use a standardized approach like
a Docker (or even K8S) PostgreSQL cluster rather than having to deal with a
vendor API.

------
ixtli
Can anyone give me an overview of why I'd want to consider looking at DO if im
already comfortable with AWS? I don't really have any issues with RDS.

~~~
DKnoll
From my own subjective experience:

DO has huge reliability issues, particularly in NYC. Over the course of
several months I had repeated brief network drops on random VMs (during EST
business hours, lasting up to a couple minutes). Their object storage in NYC3
(only location at time I used the product) would constantly drop uploads of
larger files (experienced in multiple locations behind different firewalls,
not environmental) and was also down for several days at one point not too
long ago.

Perhaps things have improved, or my experiences with roughly 20 VMs
distributed between Toronto and NYC was abnormal given the overwhelmingly
positive sentiment in this thread but I figured I'd offer my $0.02 if only to
play the contrarian.

------
blaisio
To me, this actually makes digital ocean a "real" platform. And it's still
cost effective. Very exciting.

------
slig
I've been a Linode customer for 10 years, but now this is too awesome. My next
project will be hosted on DO.

------
ianstormtaylor
Are there any big differences to this compared to Heroku’s Postgres? (Not that
there need to be, just curious if there’s reason to prefer one.)

I’m still waiting for one of these providers to crack infinite scaling
(similar to Aurora). Seamless patching is a good step though.

~~~
nasmorn
You can add additional DBs, I think in Heroku you can’t. So you can do multi
tenant or host multiple projects

------
truth_seeker
It would be great if they allow to install extensions like PipelineDB and
Citus

------
gigatexal
Yeah come on DO don’t charge me for transfer within your own Datacenter

------
ryanworl
What is the orchestration layer for this? I saw a few DO people at the
FoundationDB Summit, but that probably wasn’t related and you’re just using
ZooKeeper ;)

------
karakanb
Very exciting news! Any plans or ETA for mysql?

~~~
ci5er
What's the benefit (to you) of MySql over Postgres? I've moved completely over
to PG, and am happy as a clam.

~~~
karakanb
As a pretty basic user, it is mostly about adaptation costs regarding tooling,
infra and code. My current stack mostly includes mysql as the default db, so
my applications and tools also default to mysql and for now I don't see a huge
benefit since all I mainly do is CRUD. I am considering pgsql for some new
stuff, but for the existing applications I don't see any benefit to move to
postgre for now.

------
pritambarhate
Do these use dedicated VCPUS or Shared VCPUS?

~~~
eddiezane
Shared. We're exploring using dedicated as part of our roadmap.

------
Elect2
For Compute Droplets there are "standard droplet" using shared cpu and
"optimized droplet" can use 100% of a cpu. Then for the databases, can user
use 100% cpu even for $15 plan?

------
philip1209
Is it true that Digital Ocean has no staging environment, and just deploys
straight to production?

~~~
hartator
Other cloud providers have staging env? We just have our own VSs on DO that
plays the role of staging.

~~~
bpye
I believe he's referring to a staging environment for changes on their side.

------
the_common_man
Does this have some SLA?

------
robodale
Using fancy words like egress does not change the fact you are gouging.

