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Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative

by Vonng on 9/24/23, 12:48 PM with 50 comments

• by turtlebits on 9/24/23, 3:25 PM

  Interesting, but unless you understand every piece of software running and how they interact and are deployed, running this sounds like a devops and security nightmare.

• by nik736 on 9/24/23, 1:54 PM

  This looks very very fragile. If all of this works, great job though.

• by lucideer on 9/24/23, 7:03 PM

  This looks very good, but the marketing copy (the README is written as such) is horrendous.

  This HN thread is already full of people saying "this looks brittle", "maintenance nightmare", &c. because the README spends so long trying to convince you that this product is a huge, multifaceted kitchen sink. People want simplicity, noone is looking for a plethora of things they need to run, why would you ever try and sell anything as that?

  Most of the "features" they enumerate are either:

  - optional pg extensions that are available in normal pg by default

  - orchestration software that one might use to deploy HA pg clusters in a distributed / k8s type env anyway (i.e. it's not extra, it's just your underlying infra templates - e.g. Terraform, Patroni, &c.)

  The only thing I really see there that is "not-really-needed-kitchen-sink-extras" is the observability stack (grafana, loki, &c.)

• by jacurtis on 9/24/23, 11:00 PM

  > Free RDS Alternative

  RDS is a managed service. This is a code repo. It is useless until you deploy it at which point... it's no longer free. Then you have to manage it yourself and deal with the overhead yourself.

  This is like saying I can fire my gardener because you have a free gardener alternative, and then handing me a pair of scissors. I now have all the problems that I paid the Gardener to solve.

  Likewise, we pay AWS to manage all the headaches that deploying this would introduce. And trust me, if you are running databases at scale in production, then RDS feels very affordable considering the problems it solves.

• by slotrans on 9/24/23, 7:36 PM

  This is cool and I applaud the effort but basically no one should use this.

  Most folks should use RDS etc. (Yes, it's expensive and has limitations.)

  If you need or want to self-host, you need to understand every moving part and how they fit together. The effort and knowledge required to assemble your own setup are essential, and outsourcing them to a magic bundle would be a mistake.

• by olalonde on 9/24/23, 4:10 PM

  Title should be "Open-source Amazon RDS alternative".

• by lucgagan on 9/24/23, 3:34 PM

  I have never needed to use 95% of these extensions. Why would someone want to install all of them by default? Update nightmare.

• by tzahifadida on 9/24/23, 6:06 PM

  Where were you a year ago. I had to do ha with patroni etcd and pitr with pgbackrest myself. What I did not see is what will happen if one node dies. What is the procedure to jump start it back. Etcd is a complicated beast...

• by lazyant on 9/24/23, 8:45 PM

  I'm so confused, what's the role of Redis here? , looks like a "special case" of running redis instead of pg?

• by awestroke on 9/24/23, 2:10 PM

  Why would you ever want that many extensions?

• by dartos on 9/24/23, 4:47 PM

  So what’s the difference between this and me just running postgres in a docker container and enabling these extensions?

• by max_ on 9/24/23, 4:01 PM

  Isn't PostgreSQL Opensource?

• by trollied on 9/24/23, 1:53 PM

  Sounds like a security nightmare.

• by paulryanrogers on 9/24/23, 1:52 PM

  AGPL3, no thanks.

  Curious if there are runtime downsides to having so many extensions installed

• by Havoc on 9/24/23, 2:50 PM

  Can't say I'm following the Why? entirely.

  Is this intended as a prototyping tool?

• by fb03 on 9/25/23, 12:24 AM

  This gives me a lot of mixed feelings.

• by teddyh on 9/24/23, 4:01 PM

  HN title notwithstanding, this is a distribution of PostgreSQL (i.e. many optional extensions built in), not an “alternative”. Also, both PostgreSQL and this alternate bundle are indeed Open Source.

• by dangoodmanUT on 9/24/23, 2:24 PM

  This is cool, but this sort of proves my point to friends that Postgres isn't "production ready" out of the box, you need all kinds of tooling around it to make it so.