[HN Gopher] Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io
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Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io
Author : aejae
Score : 145 points
Date : 2023-05-30 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.databricks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.databricks.com)
| LispSporks22 wrote:
| We've been moving our workflows out of Databricks to PostgreSQL
| to save a ton. Wonder if what they're going to do with this would
| have been handy at the time.
| soulbadguy wrote:
| Where is the saving coming from if i may ask ? Are you guys
| using Databricks offerings or a self managed spark cluster ?
| llama052 wrote:
| I'm willing to bet they are moving from databricks offerings,
| considering their pricing is insanity.
| coolgoose wrote:
| Going to beat a dead horse, but 30 days to migrate your database
| over ? I hope nobody was seriously using it in production,
| otherwise it's going to be a fun month for them.
| dimfeld wrote:
| Corresponding statement from bit.io here:
| https://blog.bit.io/whats-next-for-bit-io-joining-databricks...
| itsrobforreal wrote:
| 2 months ago they had a blog post titled "bit.io's new pricing
| Always available. Guaranteed performance. No surprises."
|
| Surprise!
| tadhunt wrote:
| Congrats Adam, Jmo & team!
| snapcaster wrote:
| 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?
| cccybernetic wrote:
| It takes < 10 seconds to go from no account to database w/
| bit.io
| nostrebored wrote:
| Feature or liability depending on the market segment. To a
| ton of enterprise customers this is a nightmare.
| lionkor wrote:
| *took, as its shutting down
| thenipper wrote:
| That's a bummer, I really liked using bit.io for little
| experiments. That being said i never paid for it so i can't
| really complain.
| stumblers wrote:
| same, I'm a paying customer and liked it. I don't have
| 'production' level demands but was doing lots of prototyping
| and testing of ideas. Very easy to use and reliable enough to
| count on.
|
| Stinky.
| beoberha wrote:
| I wonder how much money is enough to give the middle finger to
| all your customers? Really disappointing to see.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Congrats to Adam and the bit.io team!
| thewataccount wrote:
| I don't mean to take away from getting hired at databricks.
|
| But my understanding is they essentially got hired at
| Databricks? Maybe got a paycheck to do it?
|
| Meanwhile they shuttered and abandoned the product and all
| customers.
|
| Is it really the goal to make an mvp and plan to get noticed
| and acquired vs actually making a product, customers can
| migrate in a month or not we don't care?
|
| The product they made was literally meant to be a reliable
| solution. 1 month for all customers to migrate away? Really?
| That's assuming they see the announcement today too, it would
| be so easy to miss the email/hacker news post.
| geodel wrote:
| Well, it is going to be incredible journey for customers now.
| newjersey wrote:
| Context for new readers
|
| https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
| tracker1 wrote:
| Been playing with CockroachLabs (CockroachDB Cloud) as a cloud db
| platform, and relatively happy with my testing so far. It isn't
| completely pg compatible, and do wish they'd expose a web based
| query interface with better connection pooling characteristics.
|
| That said, mostly PG compatible data types, indexes and queries,
| horizontally scalable with pay for what you use, free and
| reserved tiers.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Is this an acqui-hire?
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| bit.io is shutting down its service and telling all its
| customers to find a new solution, so very likely, yes.
| https://bit.io/
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Assume any acquisition without public terms done over blog post
| is an acqui-hire. But given the market that's still an
| accomplishment!
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Are there good examples where an acqui-hire works out for the
| acquiring company? Seems like the acquiring company's culture
| is almost always at odds with the company being acquired and
| it causes the high performing teams they paid dearly for to
| leave.
|
| I don't understand what a company hopes to gain doing stuff
| like this as the (long term) incentives don't seem to align.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| Firebase (which I was part of). Dunno if you count it as an
| acquihire if the product survives but I am pretty sure we
| did what the big G hoped we would
| [deleted]
| monero-xmr wrote:
| If they truly don't want the tech - meaning this is a
| straight-up acqui-hire - then the employees of the acquired
| company continue to have a job, and ideally some sort of
| bonus or earn out for staying N months or years. It is a
| nicer landing than bankruptcy.
|
| The executives of the firm being acquired usually don't
| come, unless they have some skillset the acquiring company
| needs. But they (hopefully) get a cash bonus for the
| successful acquisition.
|
| Everything is negotiable of course.
| aeyes wrote:
| The only way I have seen this work out is to give the
| aqui-hired team a ton of equity in the new company so
| that they don't jump ship immediately.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What does the acquiring company get out of this
| transaction though? What's the return on investment here
| if folks end up leaving or are completely checked out
| during their rest-n-vest? You can spend millions with a
| high end boutique consulting firm that will most likely
| be more accountable and productive than an acqui-hire.
| mousetree wrote:
| It's fairly common to not disclose the terms publicly.
| codeflo wrote:
| 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.
| qsort wrote:
| > what Databricks does
|
| It's an ancient African word that means "I am because I can't
| install Apache Spark".
| fsociety wrote:
| Just install Apache Spark they said. It will be fun they
| said.
|
| If you have the money, having a managed Spark instance with a
| bunch of added features can be a big win for some. There is a
| lot that goes into Spark maintenance.
| relativ575 wrote:
| > But it's clear that they have no problem shutting down a
| production database offering with 30 days notice
|
| Maybe there is no production db left from paying customers?
| kccqzy wrote:
| Wow you are right. The blog post doesn't even mention it but
| the home page https://bit.io/ does.
| rovr138 wrote:
| Databricks is a company by the people that built Spark.
|
| They've extended and their platform does a lot now.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| "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.
| mborch wrote:
| 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.
| Dunedan wrote:
| 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/
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| What was the original meaning? When I hear "serverless" I think
| basically:
|
| 1. I don't have to think about or manage any servers
|
| 2. Usage is metered at a very fine-grained level (per X
| requests to the API/per GB of data/etc)
|
| 3. No fixed cost. You only pay for usage.
|
| Was there a different meaning originally?
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Distributed apps. No central server involved. Peer to peer is
| one. Or each app is a server too and the information
| propagates in ripple like style. You connect to me, we sync,
| then another connects to me and this way the info that only
| you had now he has it too (and me of course). That's the
| original serverless idea. Not this walled garden crap with
| "cloud". Cloud is just a computer that is not yours and
| anything you put in there it's no longer just yours (or in
| most cases when you lose the account is no longer yours,
| period! - HN has plenty of horror stories from Google,
| Amazon, Microsoft that shit on people and call it rain).
| moneywoes wrote:
| How was bit.io different from say supabase
| rovr138 wrote:
| It's an actual database.
| newjersey wrote:
| Also to piggyback on this, supabase deactivates unused
| (unpaid) instances just like planetscale does for MySQL.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Supabase is also Postgres-based.
| https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/overview
| unixhero wrote:
| Aha consolidation in the space
|
| I think I've seen this before
| barefeg wrote:
| Are there alternatives to the database service with similar API
| or is it leaving a gap in the market?
| pistoriusp wrote:
| [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.
| brightball wrote:
| I don't know about serverless, but it's hard to beat
| Crunchydata for PostgreSQL these days. They're my goto.
| boomskats wrote:
| Just make sure you've got your pricing structure & terms
| negotiated and agreed with them well in advance of putting it
| into prod.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Neon is an awesome serverless Postgres: https://neon.tech/
| boomskats wrote:
| Second Neon, they know what they're doing. It's not their
| first rodeo.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Till the time they are also bought and "sunsetted." That's
| the problem with all these shiny startups.
| tuukkah wrote:
| 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
| edude03 wrote:
| > 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
| tuukkah wrote:
| Yes, you'd have to do some own work to set up a direct
| competitor from the provided pieces.
|
| They have published a new piece which is how they
| vertically autoscale Postgres in Kubernetes:
| https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling
| nikita wrote:
| Neon CEO here.
|
| Autoscaling with live VM migrations is quite cool. Here
| is a blog post on it: https://neon.tech/blog/scaling-
| serverless-postgres
|
| And yes, the code is open feel free to use it!
| 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV wrote:
| 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...)
| nikita wrote:
| Neon CEO. We are certainly not going to sunset Neon any
| time soon. We are extremely well funded and also growing
| super quickly. Expect some exciting announcements soon!
| rcoder wrote:
| Neon at least has open-sourced their core offering, which
| provides a migration path for folks who make bigger bets on
| their platform. So yeah, there's every possibility they'll
| go away at some point, but unlike a lot of SaaS offerings,
| it's all Postgres over the wire and under the hood, so you
| have plenty of migration options (OSS, another managed
| Postgres vendor, Aurora, Cloud SQL, etc.)
| nikita wrote:
| Neon CEO here. Definitely. Of course Neon storage is a
| distributed system and you need to know how to run it.
| But a) we can help b) Percona is a trusted partner of us
| that can support self hosting for you.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Amazon serverless Postgres aurora.
| wferrell wrote:
| Enjoyed using bit.io. Excited to see what Adam, Jmo and crew do
| at databricks.
|
| Was easy to export my dbs from bit.io -- did so this morning.
| running101 wrote:
| Get ready for your bill to go through the roof.
| colesantiago wrote:
| a great and incredible journey it has been.
| inssein wrote:
| 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.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Have you tried supabase?
| 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV wrote:
| 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.
| gdubya wrote:
| 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.
| itsrobforreal wrote:
| I'm perusing the Fabric docs and they are using Delta Lake,
| Spark and Azure Databricks as part of that solution
| fdasvklaj432 wrote:
| well i for one am very happy i never found out about bit.io,
| which looks amazing and is something i would have used instead of
| fly.io unmanaged postgres.
| newjersey wrote:
| Disclaimer: I was a non paying user and used it just to try out
| some code in dotnet entity framework and postgresql (at $work I
| only ever get to touch sql server but for hobby projects I
| thought it would be nice to do something that doesn't require
| paying Microsoft).
|
| Bit io is awesome. It just works. I mean so does elephant but
| bitio has more storage. I never got very far with my learning
| and never did tadvanced db concepts like cross apply though so
| it was just simple entities and tables but it worked just fine
| and the best part, no credit card required on file.
|
| Fly sounds nice but I don't feel so good about having to give
| them my credit card number...
| thewataccount wrote:
| > Then, final database exports will be available for download
| through July 29.
|
| Hope nobody was using bit.io as a set and forget solution...
|
| Which I thought was the entire point of the cloud hosted
| databases?
| neilv wrote:
| Is it _effectively_ Databricks that is shutting down an
| infrastructure solution on short notice?
|
| I'm not thinking about whatever legal technicalities could be
| debated by lawyers, but what real-world truth is.
| paulddraper wrote:
| You thought correctly.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| > Your databases will continue to work through June 29.
|
| This is crazy. 30 days to migrate? Hope nobody is taking a
| holiday in the next couple of weeks.
| thewataccount wrote:
| I'm surprised databricks (effectively) is willing to shutter
| a database service with 1 months notice.
|
| What does that say about their own products? What if you
| integrate their products and are locked to their platform
| without any easy migration options?
|
| If they lose interest on one of their own services, you very
| well may have 1 month to move, and 2 months to have a chance
| at keeping your data.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Seriously. Well, I guess their customer roster isn't all
| that impressive. Sounds like they're willing to burn them.
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