Aiven for PostgreSQL

Avantages

Availability and live migration feature is awesome

Inconvénients

Last time (couple weeks) it still cannot zoom to specific range of time in metric dashboard or i am wrong remember

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

Performance is much higher than Amazon RDS

Inconvénients

Failover can take quite a long time.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Aiven for PostgreSQL 

Logiciel antérieur 

Avantages

I like that is possible to deploy PostgreSQL within seconds. I also really like that is possible to upgrade to a minor or major version of PostgreSQL without a noticeable downtime. I like the offering of HA services. I like the great customer support.

Inconvénients

That it is not possible to have customizable PostgreSQL logs. On our dedicated servers we customize this logs to show us querys that last longer than 5 seconds, currently this is not possible with Aiven.

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

It's efficient: no downtime during migration scale up/down
And easy to use!

Inconvénients

Maybe an "in customer cloud" deployment for small business could be appreciable

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Aiven for PostgreSQL 

Pourquoi passer à Aiven for PostgreSQL

Avantages

- Good Terraform support
- TimescaleDB support (plus other addons)
- Very responsive sales and engineering department
- Supports all major cloud providers including Azure

Inconvénients

- Pricing is more expensive than Azures own Postgres (but that doesn't TimescaleDB)

Avantages

- Australian data centre (no one has these!)
- Postgres support
- Easy to create an account and a database
- Customer support is very good
- Documentation and guides are very good
- Intergration with Datadog was easy

Inconvénients

1. The default db is named 'defaultdb' so i created new dbs for staging/prod so i dont use the default db, i find this a bit confusing
2. On overview page only default db is shown, I would prefer to see all my db's and possibly set favourites
3. When I hit the server the Current Queries tab shows IP address but duration and db fields are blank?
4. Pricing seems a little steep for mid level single app users
5. Would like to see explanations in console graphs to better understand what they mean

Avantages

Simplicity and ease of use.
Integrates well as a middle component of the data pipeline: source to Aiven to multiple destinations.
No issues with performance.

Inconvénients

nothing

Avantages

simple to use, performant and reliable.

Inconvénients

Had to create a temporary grafana installation to grab the prometheus dashboard and took some considerable time to adapt it to our own self-hosted installation.

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

Setup is very intuitive, and it seems to work great. Support was prompt and knowledgeable (which is hugely important). PG features seem solid and the flexibility to choose the cloud hosting, size etc is great.

Inconvénients

easy Redis backup/import is still missing unfortunately. We'd love to use Aiven for redis too, but with those limitations we can't yet.

I'm still a bit hesitant about how likely Aiven is to stay in business as a company. It's not so well known and hard to know who's behind it and that it's doing well financially to keep going for many years. (btw, I think you guys should be more active on HackerNews and other geek channels where you should market yourselves.)

Avantages

Aiven provides premium security for all accounts, not as an add-on feature.

Inconvénients

The terraform plugin is not up to full feature parity, but covers most of our use cases.

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

Ease of setup and peering, account manager was helpful and responsive throughout the evaluation process, ease of upgrading instance, SLA of 100% is very appealing, just takes some of the worries away that we have :)

Inconvénients

createing a read-replica and not being able to select the specific custom vpc from aws.

Avantages

Easy to deploy and setup replication on any cloud provider we like

Inconvénients

We want to move to our production environment but we need a SOC2. Currently, aiven does not have that. WHEN WILL YOU GET IT?!

Avantages

I think the Aiven console is very useful and allows for a lot of database tasks to be completed via the UI, which is quite handy. Additionally, the dashboards built into the dashboard are pretty useful for monitoring the overall state of the Postgres instance.

Inconvénients

I feel that there is some missing documentation with the documentation on the Postgres service not being quite as complete and clear as it could be.

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

-Ease of deployment and a centralized place to manage multiple databases and services.
-Ability to choose region to deploy in

Inconvénients

- I still had credits left but my trial ended at the 30 day mark. This wasn't a huge deal and I saw the credits role over but typically with credit based trials (AWS GCP Azure) you can go until your credits are used up.

Avantages

As I am not an engineer, I use Aiven console for monitoring third party usages and reporting.
Details in the Services and Billing are useful for monthly internal reporting.
The UI for the console is user friendly and easy to use. I can get the required information that I need.

Inconvénients

As I haven't use it too long, at the moment I have none. Keep up the good work.

Avantages

The ability to link to our Google cloud cluster using VPC was very valuable. Features such as PITR and connection pooling makes Avien PostgreSQL in another league entirely when it comes to cloud services. Well done.

Inconvénients

It would be useful to allow a whitelisted IP address into the service even when its configured with VPC

Avantages

- Managed PGBouncher
- easy setup and upgrade
- quicky offering new technologies (e.g. PostgreSQL 10)

Inconvénients

- lack of integration with datadog for metrics. right now we need to get some metrics manually using the Aiven metrics API

Avantages

Its so easy to set up and get started with, and the blog article that tells you how to set up timescale db (that was the primary reason we needed aiven in the first place). I love it.

Inconvénients

Nothing to do with the service, but the fact that timescaledb wont let us use the enterprise license in aiven is deeply disappointing. But love aiven, keep up the great work guys

Avantages

Excellent "managed" db setup, overall. I liked how Aiven seemed to abstract the cloud-company-centric database offerings that each cloud co offers but made it appear "seamless" to me.

Inconvénients

Could use a better explanation of pricing w.r.t. what the standard google/amzn/do db setup might cost.

Avantages

Zero-downtime migrations and plan changes, database forks, nice metrics with iops.
Configuration seems to be hand-crafted to the installation, which is nice.

Inconvénients

Plans could be more flexible in terms of space. Would be great to be able to choose disk space independently. Even for a small database which is used to store archive data, it gets very expensive.

Avantages

Easy cloud based management of all database operational aspects.

Inconvénients

Low limits on maximum connections for SaaS use-cases where a large number of connections are required.
Do not have root/postgres admin access to install custom extensions.

Avantages

The feature set (cross-regional replication, live migration, logical decoding), and support. Support has been amazing.

Inconvénients

No mainland China support. I understand that's difficult though.

Avantages

Terraform compatibility, Easy to deploy, fast and scalable

Inconvénients

Potential Slow support due to the chat saying that "turn around time is 3 -5 hours".

Avantages

Absolutely easy setup. Just a few clicks and everything is up and running. No overhead configuration or to database specific.

I needed a Database as a service, i got a database as a service. Nothing more to say.

Inconvénients

I miss a little button to start a database backup by myself. Maybe it is there somewhere, but i am too blind...

Avantages

Taking postgres off our production servers makes them basically immutable and much easier to manage. Backup and failover of a single-node database is very important, but not part of our core competency.

Inconvénients

It would be nice to have per-aiven-user postgres admin accounts so that we can audit access via tools like psql.

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

The product is Fast and reliable and the interface is user friendly

Inconvénients

Storage sizing is not independent from machine sizing

Avantages

Timescaledb is available natively within your service.

Inconvénients

Storage is expensive and not flexible compared to AWS RDS.

Avantages

I enjoyed using the Aiven console a lot. It is very straightforward to use, well-organized and documented.

Inconvénients

Not much to complain about. Probably Services overview page could provide connection details straight away, so the user doesn't have to click on the service name to find the host and port.

Avantages

Easy deployment
Multi cloud replication
Performance

Inconvénients

A little costly
Everything else is great :)

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

Aiven services on PostgresSQL is the easier I ever met. the admin UI is user friendly, and the whole thing is secured.

Inconvénients

The time of start and stop is quiet long, but it's really nothing so far.

Avantages

No brainer provider that supports multiple cloud providers. Very easy to use and configure and customer support very helpful when needed.

Inconvénients

I haven't encountered any downside so far.

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

The ability to use the TimescaleDB Postgres Extension.

Inconvénients

The Lack of Super-User/Postgres Account access.

Avantages

Is too fast and easy get a postgrees sql instance. The biggest pro is to forget about having to manage the server and focus on the development of the application

Inconvénients

The Free trial was too short, it would be better if free trial limit were storage as 500MB of free storage i miss a small instance to make tests.

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

I really like UI/UX. It is clean enough!

Inconvénients

Not enough options. Like, need filter metrics by specific dates (not only by d/w/m/y). Or sort current queries by time.

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

It's way better, than hosting PostgreSQL by ourself, compliance with EU data protections laws, good support.

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.