We really like Nile and it is definitely a company we look towards for inspiration!
While we hope to share similar DXs, our fundamental difference is that we are focused on a BYOC-first platform instead of a serverless Postgres platform. We realized that developers who were doing strict tenant-isolation were only doing it as a means to meet their customer's demands to close deals. Often, database isolation is not the only requirement; there are requirements on which cloud a database can be hosted on, or even asks to host the database on a private cloud. For these reasons, we thought that the BYOC angle gave us more flexibility to solve these problems as well as providing a easy-to-use interface.
At bit.io, _if_ you ran the database on the free tier for the full month, it cost us around $0.83. We scaled to zero, so the most common case was that free tier DBs cost us about 1/30th of that. That database was running on its own pod, isolated from every other database.
Yes and they were really promising but they were acquired and shut down by Databricks. Not that it matters much for users, but it’s important to know why the market looks the way it does.
I worked on YouTube transcoding about 12 years ago. First, the scale is mostly reused - what’s doing transcoding now is doing a different compute job later. Transcoding was also done for most videos only on idle compute. Second, Google had 300k+ caches around the world, in many surprising places (buses, cruise ships) as well as many thousands of other larger but not full data center locations; get the content as close as possible to the user. (I imagine now all transcoding from the mezzanine format is done in real time on an edge GPU for all but the most popular platforms and content). Tl;dr: build out a huge amount of infrastructure to serve ads very quickly and you can piggyback video serving on that at little marginal cost.
This would be a welcome change for folks running PG in k8s or with any external automated configuration management. Once you want to deploy Postgres databases via API to semi-trusted users you want to have configuration control outside of the database itself. We disabled this at bit.io via patches - would have been nice if upstream had this.
The full control plane is not open source, so if you use tenants or many of the not-in-postgres features you will need to implement the control plane. It's not too much work to do so - there's already a few open source projects starting to do so - but just be aware of that.
We have a toy control plane implementation in the neon repo aliased to `cargo neon`, but also available as `neon_local`. I'm honestly not sure if open-sourcing the production control plane is in our future.
