Aiven for PostgreSQL

Inconvénients

Not being able to copy from one gb to another easily or automatically

Avantages

I have only used the PostgreSQL service so far and I really like how easy it is to start, fork en upgrade the service.

A great feature, and a must for us, is that you can choose on which cloud provider and location the service should be deployed.

We have been hosting our own PostgreSQL server for years and had to manage upgrades, backup and scaling on our own. And it feels great to finally leave that behind us and start using PostgreSQL as a service.

The support is great to. I have been in contact with the support using the chat feature and have been helped every time.

Inconvénients

The official API client was a bit hard to understand at first.

Avantages

Can't fault Aiven at all, great service, the exact services we require (postgres and elasticsearch) and always more than willing to help

Inconvénients

While it is a managed service you do need to have at least a minimum of knowledge to setup and run the services on offer.

Avantages

Aiven makes it trival to move databases between cloud providers. The stickiest thing about any hyperscaler (AWS/Google/Azure) is your data - it's a PAIN to move. Aiven makes changing your cloud provider a literal point and shoot operation, something that could take weeks of planning trying to from RDS to Cloud SQL or the like.

Inconvénients

A little more customization in the pricing would be nice (and the ability to run within a VPC instead of having to peer VPCs), but honestly there's very little I don't like about Aiven.

Avantages

It works. It seems stable. We hope someones is handling all the version updates and patches for us, but we don't get a lot of visibility into that.

Inconvénients

It's expensive and I'm not sure how much value Aiven is providing us. We consider just running Postgres on our own cloud almost every day.

Avantages

It was just super simple to start using it. The possibility to deploy the service to the same locations where we host our capacity was crucial for us.

Also as a nice plus, aiven has made their own Terraform provider which we also use to manage our capacity.

Inconvénients

Option to create "Service Accounts" would be really nice. Currently all the API tokens are tied to actual user accounts and that might cause problems at some point.

But other than that there's not much not to like :)

Avantages

Ease of use, setup and configuration is done in no time at all.

Inconvénients

Dark mode for the admin interface... "Jokes" aside, havent yet found something I am missing.

Avantages

Easy to use and manage for other users and device declaration

Inconvénients

Nothing to report now, the management of authorized ip is not the most user-friendly, but good enough.

Avantages

Easy and fast to start a new service.
Easy service overview.
Nice pricerange from hobby to business

Inconvénients

We had a service issue some time ago where we had no database for 4 hours. We needed to upgrade to business to have better fallback

Avantages

The self-service nature of everything, including vpc peering. The existence of a hashicorp terraform provider works perfectly for us :)

Inconvénients

Chat support isn't great, I'd rather be able to asynchronously create a ticket in response to issues rather than wait for staff to be available via chat. Some postgres options aren't configurable (ie. deadlock_timeout).

Avantages

The console was easy to use and intuitive. We were evaluating GCP CloudSQL vs Aiven and really what it came down to is that Aiven has better up time. CloudSQL has maintenance periods of 5-10 minutes that render the service unavailable, which is unacceptable for our uses. We also liked that Aiven could host on any major cloud platform (on GCP in our case).

Inconvénients

At first it wasn't clear to me at first that I needed to connect to the DB and create users and manage the permissions manually through the CLI. Might be nice to have an initial user creation or way to manage the db users in the console.

Alternatives envisagées 

Avantages

Cloud Version.Local SSDs, faster than our previous postgresSQl.

Inconvénients

Couldn't find anything so far but will def point out if I find in near future.

Avantages

Timescaledb is available natively within your service.

Inconvénients

Storage is expensive and not flexible compared to AWS RDS.

Avantages

The simplicity of upgrading databases.
The virtualization (to the customer) of cloud provider choices.
The ability to control all aspects of the database and users.

Inconvénients

Log file management.
Uncertainty of the company (the same as with all startups).
Performance of the low-end option.

Avantages

Easy to use and manage. The features are as expected, and just works.

Inconvénients

At the moment i don't have anything negative to a say.

Avantages

Easy to get started with, support is reactive, overall it is a great experience for newcomers.

Inconvénients

It is not much but some details about the settings of postgresql are not easy to access.

Avantages

- Showing active queries
- Show machine metrics

Inconvénients

- No filtering options for running queries
- Machine logs are very temporal; would be nice to go back in time

Avantages

Ease of use, great customer service. Super easy to configure and find the DB details you're looking for when dev-ing

Inconvénients

Some confusions around the console, configurations, but can be figured out easily enough through documentation.