
Digital Ocean Managed Databases - JonoBB
https://try.digitalocean.com/dbaas-beta/
======
nerdywordy
I for one have always liked the simplicity of DO for hosting but I've never
wanted to take on the full liability of self-rolling a DB server (and backups
and replicas). So everything my company has I've put on heroku or azure. This
has potential to be really significant as I'd wager there are a lot of folks
in similar situations.

~~~
sdegutis
If you have a relatively small set of users, setting up your own database is
usually as simple as setting it up locally and you won't need shards or
anything. And setting up backups is as simple as adding a cron job that calls
your backup shell script, which you can test separately. And by "small set of
users", consider what SQLite's own website[1] says:

    
    
        Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K
        hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day
        figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound.
        SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that
        amount of traffic.
    

If SQLite is able to comfortably handle 100k hits/day, I imagine that more
"legitimate" databases can handle more traffic comfortably without needing to
jump to scale horizontally.

[1]
[https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html](https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html)
under "Websites" section

~~~
Scarbutt
Agree sqlite is great and >80% of websites will probably run fine on it, but
100K hits/day is pretty vague, does that mean 1 hit/sec or 3 hits/sec during
peak time, etc...?

~~~
tejasmanohar
Even if that's clarified, it's vague. It doesn't entail how a hit translates
to database operations.

That said, I think it's more meant to be an anecdotal rule of thumb to tell
people "you're not Google, SQLite will work for most teams".

~~~
tracker1
It also doesn't specify a use-case. In a 98% read scenario with a good caching
strategy it can easily do much more than 100k visitors per day. If you're
taking in data from many devices you can easily bottleneck on writes.

It _really_ depends. Also, configuring everything right gets hard. Most don't
even think to do RAID over a few block storage devices, but that's something
that comes with cloud storage. That doesn't count HA and other issues before
getting to the application layer.

It's something that unless you're paying a full-time DBA, you are probably
better off buying as a service. It's one of the few holes in DO's offerings
and I'm very happy to see this.

------
teilo
It's nice that we are finally at a point where PG is the first offering,
instead of the "Coming Soon."

~~~
teknico
It is nice indeed.

Also, PostgreSQL is described as powerful, reliable, full-featured, and fast,
while MySQL as the most popular: that's all.

What is not said can be as important as what is.

------
tyingq
So now they have managed databases, load balancers, a cloud firewall that's
partially VPC like, object storage and block storage.

Assuming managed K8S is next, or maybe more "AZ/Region" h/a features. Great to
have a new player coming into this space. Especially one with reasonable
egress charges.

~~~
Ataraxy
One thing I imagine that's coming at some point is their own implementation of
"cloud functions".

~~~
cristaloleg
Or logging, tracing, metrics

------
tnolet
Just started using the new Kubernetes offering on Digital Ocean. Still in Beta
but works pretty good. If this is a sign for how they will do databases, I'm
all ears. Add CI/CD and you have a Heroku competitor.

~~~
joering2
Glad you are having fun working on your after hours side project with DO. But
please DO NOT host with DO if you plan to run a real production systems, build
a company, hire people etc. I have never found a better company to spun off a
server and play with some settings but when their algorithm decides there is
something fishy, bye bye your account, servers, backups, you never going to
see any of this ever again.

The last startup I heavily pushed with switching to OVH or even Rackspace was
exact sample of what happens when DO algorithm decides you are not genuine.
That's it. No explanation, no phone number to call, nothing. These people
blindly decided to believe their algorithm and never wanted even discuss
resuming the account or even get us backup of data. There was nothing shady
going on I assure you. Funny part is as of today DigitalOcean is still in
violation of GPPR, as we have requested to hopefully find out what was wrong
with our account by filing request for info. Nope, zit, nada, totally ignored.
We have filed complain with proper authority and also notified Attorney
General in NY and continue await result.

Build all you want on DigitalOcean, but please understand not people but their
weird algorithm is in charge of the future of your startup, future of your
company and future salary or lack therefore when you are forced to fire team
of people because you fall behind with payroll. In other words: be warned and
build at your own risk.

~~~
esistgut
Our team is currently migrating our whole production system from Linode and
GCP to Digital Ocean. Your comment is raising warnings, I'd like to hear more
from DO itself.

~~~
jarland
I'd love to chat with you. If you have some time, send an email over to
jdonnell@digitalocean.com and let's talk. I promise nothing but honesty,
transparency, ideas, and maybe a few laughs :)

~~~
zifnab06
Any chance at an invite to the k8s beta for a large-ish open source project?

~~~
jarland
Toss me an email, I'll see what I can do :)

------
whitepoplar
Wow, this is fantastic news! I think this opens the floodgates for lots of
people who currently use Heroku, and would like to use simple VPS's without
jumping into the headache that is AWS. Any word on pricing?

~~~
jkchu
What are your objections/concerns against using AWS?

I have used it both for work and in personal projects and haven't ran into any
issues/headaches.

~~~
beatgammit
Personally, I find AWS's pricing complicated, and there are so many different
services that it's confusing. I think it's mostly a UX issue, but it's really
overwhelming.

DO, Lonnie Linode, and Vultr are very simple, so that's what I use. Perhaps if
I start needing more from my hosting I'll look at AWS, but it's just not worth
my time to figure it out for the scale of projects I'm doing.

------
timmaah
I see some DO employees around.. What is the trick for getting access to the
new Kubernetes and/or postgres betas? I'd love to use both for my side hustle
(Currently on normal DO droplets)

EDIT - I now see the kubernetes option in my DO account. Thanks!

~~~
jangerhofer
Where did you find the K8s listing? I'm in a similar boat!

~~~
timmaah
Someone must have toggled the k8s beta switch for me. It wasn't there earlier.

~~~
jangerhofer
Ah, right on -- thanks!

------
andyfleming
I love that they are adding this. They are becoming a more and more viable
solution for real production projects and their UX is top-notch, especially
compared to the mess that is AWS and GCP.

------
drej
Excellent, I've just finished setting up a Postgres instance on a DO Droplet.
I hope they still allow SSH into the instance, so that I can load data
directly from there.

By the way this comes just a week after AWS Lightsail started offering the
same. Excellent stuff. [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-
databases-for-a...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-
for-amazon-lightsail/)

------
nbst
Holy crap, the fact this was missing is really the only reason I use Google
Cloud for my projects.

------
pmiri
This is the product that can finally get me to totally switch off of AWS.

Droplets <\- EC2

Spaces <\- S3

Managed Databases <\- RDS

~~~
copperx
Is Spaces fully compatible with the S3 API, in your experience?

~~~
thinkshiv
yes it is

------
tumblen
Thinking about moving from Linode to DO just for this. Makes so much sense.

Would be great to have something similar for Redis.

------
ljosa
How is DigitalOcean's resilience to DDoS attacks? After Linode's giant DDoS-
related outages a couple of years ago, I moved everything to AWS on the theory
that they (along with Google and Azure) would be better at mitigating similar
attacks. Would be nice to have DO as an option.

~~~
Something1234
Wait I thought AWS made you pay if you got hit with a DDoS or even a moderate
amount of traffic. It's just there is no cap on costs if you have any kind of
autoscaling enabled. There use to be many posts complaining about surprise
charges on AWS.

~~~
wild_preference
You basically politely ask AWS if they will refund you when you're DDoSed and
hope the attack is apparent enough to pass their threshold.

They were generous enough, but at the expense of uncertainty + you needing to
play an active role in getting them to pay your bill. Depending on what sort
of service you run, it may be a constant ordeal.

After getting some large CloudFront bills taken care of, I left and wondered
what sort of person had the stomach it.

------
servercobra
That's really exciting! DO is knocking it out the park lately as "AWS...but
easy to use". I'd love to see Mongo as a managed DB.

~~~
inscrutable
Mongo licensing prevents DO doing this themselves, although they could partner
with them.

~~~
RSZC
Currently using Mongo Atlas free tier for a side project - it's been pretty
wonderful so far

------
bovermyer
This is good news. I look forward to seeing the managed MySQL option.

~~~
thinkshiv
yes, it's next on our roadmap of engines. I work at DO FYI.

------
bonsai80
I don't see any mention of the cost. Is that listed somewhere?

~~~
thinkshiv
Hi there, this is Shiv - I am the VP of Product at DigitalOcean. Thanks for
asking about pricing. We are still working out the pricing details. I can tell
you it won't be just the cost of the Droplet because this is a managed service
with lots of additional features that you would not get with the current
Droplet product.

~~~
apapli
If you can offer some sort of “hobby” plan with a limited I/O and DB size that
would be great for hobby projects like what I build. I’ve used RDS before and
it is great, but the cost is a bit eye watering when we are talking about less
than one user every 10 minutes.

I’ve found Jaws DB works well for my needs (and pricing), but given they are
layered on AWS it does feel like I’m still a bit limited - ie it would be good
to still access the DB server so I can spin up multiple DBs (pre-prod,
production etc), despite my usage being minimal.

If DO can hit a sub $10pm price point (even with severely restricted
performance) that would be awesome!

------
brightball
Sweet mother!

#1 thing you can do to make this compete with RDS and Cloud SQL would be to
support extensions out there that they don’t. HypoPG needed by Dexter,
pg_partman, etc. Lack of certain extensions is the biggest failing of those
offerings IMO.

~~~
doh
I believe most of those are offered by Citus Cloud [0]. I know it's not the
same, but you can spin just a single worker and essentially end with a faster
PG than the vanilla PG.

[0]
[https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud](https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud)

~~~
manigandham
It starts at a minimum of 2 workers. And the pricing is steep too. The workers
only operate on distributed tables so if you can't shard your data then you
won't get any use out of those nodes, and sharding comes with its own
problems. Citus isn't recommended unless you really need the size and want to
stick with Postgres/OLTP.

~~~
doh
Didn't know it's 2. Pricing may be steeper in comparison, but it provides more
than just a hosted PG.

You are absolutely correct that you have to shard your data to take an
advantage. It's not equal to vanilla PG. It's an alternative though.

------
SnowingXIV
This looks fantastic, Heroku definitely could use some competition. I love
them but the only other option is using some insane AWS stuff with nonsensical
icons and naming. Hope this takes off and adds a nice CI.

~~~
manigandham
Insane? AWS RDS is rather self-contained and simple enough to get started with
if you use the defaults. They also offer managed dbs as a simpler option with
Lightsail:
[https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/](https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/)

And there are tons of managed database hosting providers outside of Heroku.

------
l5870uoo9y
Anybody hosting an online business on Digital Ocean (or similar VPS)? All
companies I see all use Heruko, AWS or GCP.

~~~
james33
We've been slowly moving from AWS to DO over the last 6 months due to cost,
performance and ease of use. We haven't had any issues and the support has
been far superior as well. We wrote up a benchmarking comparison with some
reasoning behind the switch:
[https://goldfirestudios.com/blog/150/Benchmarking-AWS-
Digita...](https://goldfirestudios.com/blog/150/Benchmarking-AWS-DigitalOcean-
Linode-Packet-and-Vultr).

~~~
l5870uoo9y
Great read, thanks for sharing.

------
inscrutable
very interesting. With this and the new DO kubernetes offering (if both are
reliable), DO could be a compelling option for postgres-based kubernetes
clusters baseload - circa half the price of google cloud.

All the other stuff you need like logs and monitoring can be installed with
helm charts.

------
St-Clock
I wonder if this is a response to Amazon Lightsail[1] now offering managed
database?

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-
for-a...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-amazon-
lightsail/)

~~~
thinkshiv
Hi there! I lead products at DO and we've had DBaaS on our roadmap for some
time now.

~~~
Implicated
Any chance someone could fast-track an inclusion for me of both the k8s and
managed db solutions?

I'm leading a team that is _literally_ days away from provisioning a cluster
for an existing production SaaS application that's currently on DO vm's. Would
prefer to stay with DO..

My email is in profile - happy to answer any questions.

~~~
phildougherty
Hey there! DO Kubernetes PM here.

I just added you so you have access to the product. I will reach out to the PM
on DBaaS as well.

~~~
Implicated
Thank you!

------
ksec
I think that is the final major puzzle to going All in on DO, hopefully it
would not be built on top of their current Droplet config but much more
customised for DB's need.

On the Subject of DO, I am wondering am I the only one who felt the need of
1vCPU to 1GB RAM droplet? Given the vCPU aren't even core but thread. Now that
Managed DB is in place that is even more need for frameworks like Rails, my
guess for other framework would need even less memory per process / Thread. I
was hoping AMD EPYC will make that happen, but so far nothing has happened yet
on all other VM hosting providers. May be EPYC 2.

And if DO will someday provide an CDN, or reselling of CDN through
partnership.( Although BunnyCDN seems to be working great for me at the
moment.)

------
cowmix
Postgresql first.. finally.. cool!

------
zafiro17
I was looking for hosted PostgreSQL and eventually wound up at
[http://elephantsql.com](http://elephantsql.com), with which I've been happy.
I don't have a 'production' service in that I'm not relying on a DB to sell a
service, like underpinning an app/website. But my DB is mission critical for
knowledge management for my business, and I don't trust myself to manage the
server properly. Nice to see competition in this space, and DO is a good one
to be offering hosted databases - I'm happy with their other services too.

------
nojvek
I’ve loved the simplicity and speed of DO.

DO has definitely a lot to offer via some simple cloudy things as

1) Good ol VMS and load balancers - they already do

2) Managed K8s - may be they already do? I dunno

3) Managed DBs - good to see this.

4) Big fat blob store (like s3) - not sure. CDN that operates over blob store
would be nice too.

With this pieces, one can develop quite a significantly complex and scalable
application without worrying about infra.

AWS, Azure, GCP are wayyy too complicated. There’s definitely a niche for an
IAAS Company to only do the few important things and do them better (speed,
reliability, price) than the big 3 and steal a meaningful chunk of the market.

------
joshuatalb
I’ve been hoping for this for a while. I’m eagerly awaiting access to their
Kubernetes service, so this is a perfect compliment to the upcoming service
releases.

Also interesting timing too. Amazon Lightsail (the cheaper AWS alternative) is
similarly priced to providers such as DigitalOcean, Linode, etc and released
their managed database offering the other day:
[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-
for-a...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-managed-databases-for-amazon-
lightsail/)

------
mtw
Would be great to see a benchmark vs a database in a regular DigitalOcean
droplet, or information about hardware. This information would be useful for
projects requiring high performance per sec.

~~~
tracker1
No details on pricing, but wouldn't be surprised to see the pricing close to
matching a droplet, and deploying managed over existing infrastructure. There
are of course tweaks I've seen for performance on existing clouds (raiding
over block storage devices), tweaking swap space/usage, etc.

Not sure how deep it'll go in the managed usage, but very happy to see it. The
one piece I've really felt was deeply missing.

------
jagger27
Well that news just made feel great about picking Postgres for my current SaaS
project. Definitely going to be migrating over once I get access!

I wonder how long they've been working on this.

~~~
thinkshiv
We've been working on this for some time. We announced earlier in the year
that we want to offer this type of a managed service and we will start with
one engine for now. Disclosure: I lead Products at DigitalOcean.

------
ianwalter
This is great but I wish they would give some more insight into the early
access system. Ive been waiting for Kubernetes access for what seems like an
eternity.

------
galby
Caught this late this morning - any DO employees still here? I'm signed up for
the k8 & postgres betas but haven't had any luck getting k8 opened up. Would
LOVE to participate in the postgres managed beta - definitely trying to move
off from AWS for this.

bryan at priceflow.com

------
franciscop
This is a huge deal for me personally, and probably the main and only reason
why I haven't used Digital Ocean for real yet. Let's see how the pricing goes,
since having many small projects each one with very little requirements
normally means paying a lot of $.

------
thegeekpirate
This is fantastic timing—I didn't feel like dealing with Postgres
configuration/management, so I went with CockroachDB instead (which also
forced me off a CPU core since I required more RAM).

Here's to hoping that receiving access doesn't take too long ^_^

------
jaequery
This is a game changer. But just how much more reliable will this be compared
to Amazon RDS?

------
chaostheory
This was what held me back from using DO for all my projects. Happy it's here
now.

------
icpmacdo
What is the cost?

------
dylrich
If anyone from DO is around - Will libprotobuf-c be available on managed
postgres? I ask because for the longest time AWS RDS didn't support cutting
Mapbox Vector Tiles from PostGIS.

~~~
bk_avalara
We ran into this same problem. The RDS team fixed this earlier this month when
they launched support for 10.5. It's buried in this blog post:
[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/10/rds-
postg...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/10/rds-postgresql-
supports-minor-versions/)

------
no1youknowz
Would be awesome if DO also included support for MemSQL.

I know MemSQL back in 2017 announced managed services, but I'm pretty sure
they closed it. Although I can't find a link.

~~~
manigandham
MemSQL is a great product but it's a niche offering and requires proprietary
licensing by capacity so it'll probably never be provided as a managed
offering by anyone, especially by a smaller player like DO.

------
dhbradshaw
Very interesting.

I put up a few different sights on a droplet and have been preparing to make a
switch over to Heroku exactly for the sake of the managed postgres.

Maybe I won't have to!

------
ngrilly
Is there an expected downtime during system updates?

~~~
tracker1
updates look like they are on-demand... you have to click to run db updates.

------
jason_slack
I bet it is going to be very expensive. I have a 300gb MySQL database that
needs a more reliable home. I add about 800mb if data a day.

~~~
tracker1
DO's block storage is around $10:100GB though it probably won't have as
flexible capacity planning for you, so you'll likely want to start around 2TB
to account for 2+ years growth.

note: I'm not affiliated with DO in any way and pricing and capacity are only
speculation.

------
duboff
Would love a chance to test this and the k8s service out. My email is mikhail
at chattermill dot io

------
aneesv
Great to see DO adding managed db. Looking forward to see cloud functions.

------
DataInSolutions
this is fantastic! I've got several droplets for smaller customers and it's
always a pain to setup and manage a DB for them.

I just hope it's not terribly expensive for the smallest tier.

------
thakobyan
Would love to get an early access to DO k8s!

------
KaoruAoiShiho
What are the chances of mongodb?

------
the_cat_kittles
this is a useful thing as i often did these by hand on DO before, and they are
a bit of a pain. but if their pricing for volumes is any indication, these
will be pretty expensive. curious what the price is going to be.

