[HN Gopher] Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io ___________________________________________________________________ Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io Author : aejae Score : 145 points Date : 2023-05-30 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.databricks.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.databricks.com) | LispSporks22 wrote: | We've been moving our workflows out of Databricks to PostgreSQL | to save a ton. Wonder if what they're going to do with this would | have been handy at the time. | soulbadguy wrote: | Where is the saving coming from if i may ask ? Are you guys | using Databricks offerings or a self managed spark cluster ? | llama052 wrote: | I'm willing to bet they are moving from databricks offerings, | considering their pricing is insanity. | coolgoose wrote: | Going to beat a dead horse, but 30 days to migrate your database | over ? I hope nobody was seriously using it in production, | otherwise it's going to be a fun month for them. | dimfeld wrote: | Corresponding statement from bit.io here: | https://blog.bit.io/whats-next-for-bit-io-joining-databricks... | itsrobforreal wrote: | 2 months ago they had a blog post titled "bit.io's new pricing | Always available. Guaranteed performance. No surprises." | | Surprise! | tadhunt wrote: | Congrats Adam, Jmo & team! | snapcaster wrote: | What benefits does one get from using bit.io or other equivalents | compared to the AWS built in Aurora? is their offering different | and I'm just confused by the jargon? | cccybernetic wrote: | It takes < 10 seconds to go from no account to database w/ | bit.io | nostrebored wrote: | Feature or liability depending on the market segment. To a | ton of enterprise customers this is a nightmare. | lionkor wrote: | *took, as its shutting down | thenipper wrote: | That's a bummer, I really liked using bit.io for little | experiments. That being said i never paid for it so i can't | really complain. | stumblers wrote: | same, I'm a paying customer and liked it. I don't have | 'production' level demands but was doing lots of prototyping | and testing of ideas. Very easy to use and reliable enough to | count on. | | Stinky. | beoberha wrote: | I wonder how much money is enough to give the middle finger to | all your customers? Really disappointing to see. | eatonphil wrote: | Congrats to Adam and the bit.io team! | thewataccount wrote: | I don't mean to take away from getting hired at databricks. | | But my understanding is they essentially got hired at | Databricks? Maybe got a paycheck to do it? | | Meanwhile they shuttered and abandoned the product and all | customers. | | Is it really the goal to make an mvp and plan to get noticed | and acquired vs actually making a product, customers can | migrate in a month or not we don't care? | | The product they made was literally meant to be a reliable | solution. 1 month for all customers to migrate away? Really? | That's assuming they see the announcement today too, it would | be so easy to miss the email/hacker news post. | geodel wrote: | Well, it is going to be incredible journey for customers now. | newjersey wrote: | Context for new readers | | https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ | tracker1 wrote: | Been playing with CockroachLabs (CockroachDB Cloud) as a cloud db | platform, and relatively happy with my testing so far. It isn't | completely pg compatible, and do wish they'd expose a web based | query interface with better connection pooling characteristics. | | That said, mostly PG compatible data types, indexes and queries, | horizontally scalable with pay for what you use, free and | reserved tiers. | candiddevmike wrote: | Is this an acqui-hire? | lern_too_spel wrote: | bit.io is shutting down its service and telling all its | customers to find a new solution, so very likely, yes. | https://bit.io/ | monero-xmr wrote: | Assume any acquisition without public terms done over blog post | is an acqui-hire. But given the market that's still an | accomplishment! | candiddevmike wrote: | Are there good examples where an acqui-hire works out for the | acquiring company? Seems like the acquiring company's culture | is almost always at odds with the company being acquired and | it causes the high performing teams they paid dearly for to | leave. | | I don't understand what a company hopes to gain doing stuff | like this as the (long term) incentives don't seem to align. | tlarkworthy wrote: | Firebase (which I was part of). Dunno if you count it as an | acquihire if the product survives but I am pretty sure we | did what the big G hoped we would | [deleted] | monero-xmr wrote: | If they truly don't want the tech - meaning this is a | straight-up acqui-hire - then the employees of the acquired | company continue to have a job, and ideally some sort of | bonus or earn out for staying N months or years. It is a | nicer landing than bankruptcy. | | The executives of the firm being acquired usually don't | come, unless they have some skillset the acquiring company | needs. But they (hopefully) get a cash bonus for the | successful acquisition. | | Everything is negotiable of course. | aeyes wrote: | The only way I have seen this work out is to give the | aqui-hired team a ton of equity in the new company so | that they don't jump ship immediately. | candiddevmike wrote: | What does the acquiring company get out of this | transaction though? What's the return on investment here | if folks end up leaving or are completely checked out | during their rest-n-vest? You can spend millions with a | high end boutique consulting firm that will most likely | be more accountable and productive than an acqui-hire. | mousetree wrote: | It's fairly common to not disclose the terms publicly. | codeflo wrote: | I haven't heard of either of those companies. I don't even fully | understand what Databricks does. But it's clear that they have no | problem shutting down a production database offering with 30 days | notice, and have the gall to title this action "Investing in the | Developer Experience". If this doesn't send a message that you | shouldn't trust them with anything important, I don't know what | would. | qsort wrote: | > what Databricks does | | It's an ancient African word that means "I am because I can't | install Apache Spark". | fsociety wrote: | Just install Apache Spark they said. It will be fun they | said. | | If you have the money, having a managed Spark instance with a | bunch of added features can be a big win for some. There is a | lot that goes into Spark maintenance. | relativ575 wrote: | > But it's clear that they have no problem shutting down a | production database offering with 30 days notice | | Maybe there is no production db left from paying customers? | kccqzy wrote: | Wow you are right. The blog post doesn't even mention it but | the home page https://bit.io/ does. | rovr138 wrote: | Databricks is a company by the people that built Spark. | | They've extended and their platform does a lot now. | unnouinceput wrote: | "Serverless"...this word is so thrown around nowadays that it | lost its original meaning. Same way the phrase "we're like a | family" transitioned from a beloved one in 50's to its thrown | away in 90's meaningless all the way to today be considered a red | flag when you hear such a word at a hiring interview, the | "serverless" word is in its late 90's nowadays. One decade and | will become just another red flag. | mborch wrote: | The meaning is pretty clear: you don't manage compute, it | scales up elastically based on demand, even all the way to | zero. Ideally, it reacts quickly enough to changes in demand | that you don't need to worry about it. Serverless is basically | the original promise of the cloud. | Dunedan wrote: | It's not as clear as you think, because companies are | watering it down. Just have a look what "serverless"-branded | services AWS published the past years. | | Take "OpenSearch Serverless" for example: They claim "you | only pay for the resources consumed by the workload", but | even if you have an OpenSearch Serverless collection you | don't use, you pay at least ~$690/month (and that's not even | accounting for stored data)! | | https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/pricing/ | thinkharderdev wrote: | What was the original meaning? When I hear "serverless" I think | basically: | | 1. I don't have to think about or manage any servers | | 2. Usage is metered at a very fine-grained level (per X | requests to the API/per GB of data/etc) | | 3. No fixed cost. You only pay for usage. | | Was there a different meaning originally? | unnouinceput wrote: | Distributed apps. No central server involved. Peer to peer is | one. Or each app is a server too and the information | propagates in ripple like style. You connect to me, we sync, | then another connects to me and this way the info that only | you had now he has it too (and me of course). That's the | original serverless idea. Not this walled garden crap with | "cloud". Cloud is just a computer that is not yours and | anything you put in there it's no longer just yours (or in | most cases when you lose the account is no longer yours, | period! - HN has plenty of horror stories from Google, | Amazon, Microsoft that shit on people and call it rain). | moneywoes wrote: | How was bit.io different from say supabase | rovr138 wrote: | It's an actual database. | newjersey wrote: | Also to piggyback on this, supabase deactivates unused | (unpaid) instances just like planetscale does for MySQL. | CharlesW wrote: | Supabase is also Postgres-based. | https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/overview | unixhero wrote: | Aha consolidation in the space | | I think I've seen this before | barefeg wrote: | Are there alternatives to the database service with similar API | or is it leaving a gap in the market? | pistoriusp wrote: | [disclosure: I'm the founder of Snaplet] | | I think there are a lot of different reasons why people may | want to use a service like bit.io, but if you want a database | with data in it to code against, run tests against, reproduce | production related data-bugs, and run e2e tests against then | check out https://www.snaplet.dev. | brightball wrote: | I don't know about serverless, but it's hard to beat | Crunchydata for PostgreSQL these days. They're my goto. | boomskats wrote: | Just make sure you've got your pricing structure & terms | negotiated and agreed with them well in advance of putting it | into prod. | tuukkah wrote: | Neon is an awesome serverless Postgres: https://neon.tech/ | boomskats wrote: | Second Neon, they know what they're doing. It's not their | first rodeo. | ilrwbwrkhv wrote: | Till the time they are also bought and "sunsetted." That's | the problem with all these shiny startups. | tuukkah wrote: | Not this one though, they are open source so someone else | would start to offer new hosted instances: | https://github.com/neondatabase/neon | | Some Helm charts: https://github.com/neondatabase/helm- | charts | | It could potentially be one of their partners: | | Vercel https://neon.tech/docs/guides/vercel | | Hasura https://neon.tech/docs/guides/hasura | edude03 wrote: | > Some Helm charts: https://github.com/neondatabase/helm- | charts | | For the record though, they're not enough to run neon | today[0] - this has been a "problem" since neon was | announced here[1]. | | [0]: https://github.com/neondatabase/helm- | charts/issues/35#issue-... | | [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31540691 | tuukkah wrote: | Yes, you'd have to do some own work to set up a direct | competitor from the provided pieces. | | They have published a new piece which is how they | vertically autoscale Postgres in Kubernetes: | https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling | nikita wrote: | Neon CEO here. | | Autoscaling with live VM migrations is quite cool. Here | is a blog post on it: https://neon.tech/blog/scaling- | serverless-postgres | | And yes, the code is open feel free to use it! | 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV wrote: | I found their docker-compose more helpful than their | chart: | https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/blob/main/docker- | compos... | | But I also needed to read their Ansible files to | understand how they manage their infra better. Those are | deleted now, but luckily you can just look at the history | (commit that deleted it: https://github.com/neondatabase/ | neon/commit/0d3d022eb1fe4a42...) | nikita wrote: | Neon CEO. We are certainly not going to sunset Neon any | time soon. We are extremely well funded and also growing | super quickly. Expect some exciting announcements soon! | rcoder wrote: | Neon at least has open-sourced their core offering, which | provides a migration path for folks who make bigger bets on | their platform. So yeah, there's every possibility they'll | go away at some point, but unlike a lot of SaaS offerings, | it's all Postgres over the wire and under the hood, so you | have plenty of migration options (OSS, another managed | Postgres vendor, Aurora, Cloud SQL, etc.) | nikita wrote: | Neon CEO here. Definitely. Of course Neon storage is a | distributed system and you need to know how to run it. | But a) we can help b) Percona is a trusted partner of us | that can support self hosting for you. | ed25519FUUU wrote: | Amazon serverless Postgres aurora. | wferrell wrote: | Enjoyed using bit.io. Excited to see what Adam, Jmo and crew do | at databricks. | | Was easy to export my dbs from bit.io -- did so this morning. | running101 wrote: | Get ready for your bill to go through the roof. | colesantiago wrote: | a great and incredible journey it has been. | inssein wrote: | Damn, 30 days is quick. I found out about https://neon.tech but | then quickly ran into a major bug, and then thankfully found out | about bit.io, which is what I use for https://dittoed.app. | | Looks like I will have to go back to neon (they fixed the bug). | | If anyone has other ideas, I'm all ears. Project is hosted on | Cloudflare and they have D1 now, but Dittoed uses a little bit of | PostGIS. | singpolyma3 wrote: | Have you tried supabase? | 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV wrote: | Neon sounds good for you. I'd wager any kind of managed | database is fine, so the question is if you enjoy the | features/cost savings Neon brings. Otherwise I cannot recommend | using a managed DB enough because that's the best 20 bucks | you're gonna spend. | gdubya wrote: | This is interesting... possibly a move by Databricks to try and | build on their "data lakehouse" concept to counter the recent | "Fabric platform" announcements at MS Build. | | Databricks coined the "Delta lake" concept and are still (just | about) leading the way, but Fabric has the potential from MS to | take away that marketshare. Databricks need to improve their | "serverless SQL" offering, and add a serious "data warehouse" | component alongside the lake. | itsrobforreal wrote: | I'm perusing the Fabric docs and they are using Delta Lake, | Spark and Azure Databricks as part of that solution | fdasvklaj432 wrote: | well i for one am very happy i never found out about bit.io, | which looks amazing and is something i would have used instead of | fly.io unmanaged postgres. | newjersey wrote: | Disclaimer: I was a non paying user and used it just to try out | some code in dotnet entity framework and postgresql (at $work I | only ever get to touch sql server but for hobby projects I | thought it would be nice to do something that doesn't require | paying Microsoft). | | Bit io is awesome. It just works. I mean so does elephant but | bitio has more storage. I never got very far with my learning | and never did tadvanced db concepts like cross apply though so | it was just simple entities and tables but it worked just fine | and the best part, no credit card required on file. | | Fly sounds nice but I don't feel so good about having to give | them my credit card number... | thewataccount wrote: | > Then, final database exports will be available for download | through July 29. | | Hope nobody was using bit.io as a set and forget solution... | | Which I thought was the entire point of the cloud hosted | databases? | neilv wrote: | Is it _effectively_ Databricks that is shutting down an | infrastructure solution on short notice? | | I'm not thinking about whatever legal technicalities could be | debated by lawyers, but what real-world truth is. | paulddraper wrote: | You thought correctly. | ibejoeb wrote: | > Your databases will continue to work through June 29. | | This is crazy. 30 days to migrate? Hope nobody is taking a | holiday in the next couple of weeks. | thewataccount wrote: | I'm surprised databricks (effectively) is willing to shutter | a database service with 1 months notice. | | What does that say about their own products? What if you | integrate their products and are locked to their platform | without any easy migration options? | | If they lose interest on one of their own services, you very | well may have 1 month to move, and 2 months to have a chance | at keeping your data. | ibejoeb wrote: | Seriously. Well, I guess their customer roster isn't all | that impressive. Sounds like they're willing to burn them. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-05-30 23:00 UTC)