[HN Gopher] Open and portable Postgres-as-a-service. Also availa...
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       Open and portable Postgres-as-a-service. Also available on Hetzner
        
       Author : padmanabhank
       Score  : 68 points
       Date   : 2023-12-14 20:33 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.ubicloud.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.ubicloud.com)
        
       | canadiantim wrote:
       | This looks promising, will be excited to see more regions coming
       | in, especially US-east!
        
         | umur wrote:
         | (author of the post here)
         | 
         | Thank you, and yes, we will be in the US in the next few
         | months.
        
           | jimkoen wrote:
           | I can't believe it took this long for someone to offer open
           | core, cross vendor cloud deployments.
           | 
           | I feel like this is going to take off, especially if you're
           | targeting Hetzner.
           | 
           | With regards to the latter, have you guys thought about a
           | cross vendor object storage offering? It's the #1 most
           | requested service on Hetzner and they have repeadetly
           | mentioned that they do not want to venture into this space.
           | Feels like a low hanging fruit to take at this point.
           | 
           | Are you guys open for CV submissions? I'm a student from
           | Germany and would love to intern / work for you guys and be a
           | part of this. I've worked with OpenStack previously (though
           | as an end user, not an admin) , which offers some AWS
           | failover capabilities, but nothing truly like this.
        
             | umur wrote:
             | Yes, exactly, our object store is in the works.
             | 
             | And thank you, we are hiring. Could you send your CV to
             | imagine at ubicloud dot com?
        
       | glutamate wrote:
       | Not sure what "open" means here, because it does not mean open
       | source.
        
         | memset wrote:
         | How does it not? https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud
        
           | glutamate wrote:
           | Open source does not mean "I can read the source code". Open
           | source means release under an open source license and this is
           | not the case here.
        
             | OJFord wrote:
             | But as you said yourself the claim isn't 'open source',
             | it's 'open', so...what do you want really?
             | 
             | I understand this complaint (I get both sides really) when
             | it's a non OSI licence being called 'open source', but you
             | can't just start extending that to the single words 'open'
             | and 'source' too. 'I don't know what "source available"
             | means, because it certainly doesn't mean available under
             | open source licence', etc.
        
         | herval wrote:
         | Are u saying the code linked isn't from the thing itself?
        
           | glutamate wrote:
           | I'm saying that code linked is not open source licensed
        
         | chris1993 wrote:
         | The source is available (https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud)
         | and the license says it's free to use so long as you don't use
         | it to run a hosted service. It looks fairly 'open'?
        
         | umur wrote:
         | It means that our source code is open and transparent to all of
         | our users. You can use it for free, modify it, or even re-
         | distribute it - the main restriction is that you are not
         | offering it as a managed service to third parties.
         | 
         | If you have a particular use-case in mind that you need but
         | feel is limited, please let us know. Happy to talk through it
         | and see how we can help.
        
           | glutamate wrote:
           | I'm not really a prospective big user of this category; but i
           | think your project looks super cool and you obviously know
           | your stuff engineering-wise.
           | 
           | I think the use of no-hosting clause is super ambiguous here
           | because the nature of the project itself is hosting and
           | providing managed services of VMs, postgres etc for users -
           | so anyone using ubicloud is in some sense providing a managed
           | or hosted service.
           | 
           | How about licensing under GPL or AGPL with a commercial
           | license option? Corporations are so GPL-phobic that they
           | would probably pay you for a commercial license.
        
             | umur wrote:
             | Ah, I see. The key part above is "to third parties". If
             | you're using ubicloud to provide a managed/hosted service
             | for yourself, or your company, that's wonderful. You could
             | even be a massive organization and do that. It's just that
             | you are not providing the managed service to other parties
             | such as your customers - essentially, that you're not a
             | hosting provider re-selling the software.
        
               | glutamate wrote:
               | The ambiguity is in who is a third party. If I am a small
               | digital agency and I have a hetzner server with ubicloud
               | and I use it to host my clients websites, e.g 10 small
               | businesses pay me $200/m each to host their wordpress
               | websites, are they third parties? Can I do this?
        
           | ipaddr wrote:
           | Also changing anything related to keys
        
       | AaronX1A wrote:
       | Anyone know of something like this that's self hosted?
        
         | depereo wrote:
         | Self hosted postgres? Yeah, that's been around forever.
        
         | bmelton wrote:
         | This is, as well as Postgres.
        
         | mdaniel wrote:
         | It's a _slightly_ different use case, but https://neon.tech may
         | interest you and is _actually_ Open Source (Apache 2)
         | https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/blob/main/LICENSE
        
           | kosolam wrote:
           | This one looks great too. How hard is it to setup this for
           | self hosting?
        
         | verdverm wrote:
         | If you are on k8s, the Zalando operator is an excellent choice:
         | https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator
        
         | turtles3 wrote:
         | Can recommend the cnpg project https://github.com/cloudnative-
         | pg/cloudnative-pg
         | 
         | It's a kubernetes operator for postgres with a pretty good
         | range of features
         | 
         | Honestly I wish something of this standard existed for mysql -
         | I'd never use RDS again by choice.
        
         | jimkoen wrote:
         | > https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud
         | 
         | Their repo is public
        
       | jph wrote:
       | Looks great! How do PG extensions work with this? For example
       | PostGIS, pgvector, and pg_jsonschema?
        
       | hipadev23 wrote:
       | When is tech going to realize Hetzner anything is a big negative.
        
         | rajamaka wrote:
         | Why is that?
        
       | bdcravens wrote:
       | Does it have point in time restore? The ability to pause and go
       | unbilled? (other than storage) Easy resizing? etc
       | 
       | Not being snarky, but RDS is more than just a server app with a
       | decent UI. It has specific advantages over just standing up a VPS
       | and running apt install.
        
         | walski wrote:
         | They seem to do PITR [1], not sure about other features. The
         | docs and particularly the Postgres section of it seem very
         | thin.
         | 
         | 1: https://www.ubicloud.com/docs/managed-postgresql/backup-
         | and-...
        
       | jayski wrote:
       | I actually thought of building this same idea but on OVH
       | infrastructure.
        
       | asah wrote:
       | nice. big diff seems to be cost. Could be useful for analytics
       | workloads, i.e. read replicas.
       | 
       | https://www.ubicloud.com/docs/managed-postgresql/price-perfo...
       | 
       | Would be nice to see copy-and-paste instructions for setting up
       | read replicas from RDS etc.
        
       | kosolam wrote:
       | Hey ubicloud!
       | 
       | Does it have zero downtime upgrades and HA?
       | 
       | We are currently self hosting postgres simply. But missing HA and
       | zero downtime upgrades.
       | 
       | Thanks!
        
         | abrookewood wrote:
         | RDS doesn't have zero downtime updates from what I know - they
         | update & failover so there is a brief outage (1-2 min).
        
       | ko_pivot wrote:
       | Ubicloud seems very cool, but I wonder what the long term plan
       | for volumes is. Without network attached storage (EBS), running
       | stateful services is tricky.
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-14 23:00 UTC)