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Ask HN: Would you want a distributed Postgres that runs on Spot Instances?

8 pointsby alexirobbinsover 4 years ago
At my startup Tamber (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tamber.com) we have had to deliver very high database I&#x2F;O without breaking the bank. Our solution provides two main features:<p>1. Database workers run on AWS Spot Instances for cheap, scalable clusters.<p>2. Pseudo-masterless architecture where clients read&#x2F;write directly to the workers for true horizontal scaling + low latency (implemented in Golang).<p>In order to pull this off, we have also developed:<p><pre><code> - automatic worker replacement with backfill through Kafka - spot instance price and stability prediction for optimal instance selection and pre-emptive replacement - connection pooling w&#x2F; pgbouncer - zero downtime cluster scaling (adding&#x2F;removing workers, rebalancing table-shards - things Citus only includes in their Enterprise fork). </code></pre> We would love to develop an Open Source service that others can use and contribute to if there is interest. Would love to answer any questions!

7 comments

blackpandaover 4 years ago
My Guess is that 99% of the companies do not need such a solution. But 1% does. And if you target them, you have a business. Unfortunately that 1% does not frequent here (I guess).
Chyzwarover 4 years ago
Why this is better than Cassandra&#x2F;ScyllaDB&#x2F;CouchDB&#x2F;Dynamo ? Data is partitioned and joins are not possible ?
ddorian43over 4 years ago
Maybe you can build something on top of YugabyteDB since it adds sharding&#x2F;replication on top of PostgreSQL.
amirathiover 4 years ago
(for regular workloads) cost of maintaining such a DB &gt;&gt; cost of RDS<p>It&#x27;s a very interesting problem from a technical standpoint nonetheless.
tcbascheover 4 years ago
Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier to just use a serverless option like AWS Aurora?
arthurcolleover 4 years ago
Sounds pricy! So probably not
johnghanksover 4 years ago
no