Oh thanks for the props Kurt. The idea of PaaS disaggregation is definitely something I've been pondering for a bit and think I'm on the same page. At Heroku we were very opinionated about only Postgres for the longest time. We were fortunate to build-out the add-on ecosystem to give you more options, and explicitly did not want to run them ourselves for the longest time. I'm not sure how lucky we were vs. good, but surely spreading ourselves out to be platform + Postgres + everything else would not have resulted in the same experience.
It turns out running a PaaS is a lot of work. Running a DBaaS is also a lot of work. If you've ever dealt with database corruption, it's not the thing you can just hand wave and do the same way across all databases, you need deep expertise in it, that or you say it's not my problem and offer a poor customer experience. Personally feels like we can do better in service quality as platform/database providers so doing one thing really well feels like a good direction to head for a bit (at least that's heavily what we're betting on at Crunchy Data by just focusing deeply and purely on Postgres).
genuinely curious - this is the first time im hearing of crunchydata in a "versus RDS" context.
is there a pricing and feature comparison for RDS vs Crunchydata ? a honest tradeoff comparison.
We don't have anything published, but some of the basic summary on why us:
- We give you full Postgres super user access, so less restrictions
- Quality of support, whether it's the Postgres basics of indexing or you've found a crazy bug deep in Postgres. Our team contributes a lot to upstream Postgres itself and can go as deep as we need to, but in general quality of support is a big differentiator for us
- We've been able to beat in cases price to performance just on the mix of Postgres experience coupled with our experience running on AWS/other clouds.
- Not locked into a single cloud, can go from AWS to Azure and vice versa with click of a button.
There's more details, and more coming particularly around the developer experience and proactively improving your database for you. But that's the high level pitch.
It turns out running a PaaS is a lot of work. Running a DBaaS is also a lot of work. If you've ever dealt with database corruption, it's not the thing you can just hand wave and do the same way across all databases, you need deep expertise in it, that or you say it's not my problem and offer a poor customer experience. Personally feels like we can do better in service quality as platform/database providers so doing one thing really well feels like a good direction to head for a bit (at least that's heavily what we're betting on at Crunchy Data by just focusing deeply and purely on Postgres).