Aiven for PostgreSQL

Vorteile

I like how easy it is to create and manage Postgres instance using Aiven + it's not that expensive in comparison to other providers.

Nachteile

I would like to have more insights in query performance.

Vorteile

Good software for automating database operations, has good features to facilitate connections, completely secures data, and offers a free trial.

Nachteile

Sometimes problems occur in copying operations, this platform needs to be updated to increase work efficiency.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

The general ease of operation for:
- Spinning up new databases
- Scaling up
- Scaling down
- Migrating to a different region
- Restoring backups
Is really great. It's amazing how many features you get out of the box.
The plans with redundancy are also cool because you get full access to the slave as a read-only replica, this means you can run heavy select queries without putting load on the main database.
There is a very significant "it just works" factor to it, which is not something I would imagine myself saying about a database provider so easily.

Nachteile

They are not the cheapest
Monitoring/alerting options were a bit lackluste, but this has improved recently.

Vorteile

The best thing are the no-downtime migrations and upgrades. The setup was quick and easy and since then no maintenance has been required. Customer service is great and pro-active. The dashboard works well.

Nachteile

As far as I can tell there's no way to set a separate billing email.

It would be nice to also see in the dashboard what's taking up most memory and disk space and to be able to set up alerts, such as if there are queries that take too long to execute.

Vorteile

Datacenters in multiple regions, multiple PostgreSQL versions. General high level of availability. Support is helpful and pretty fast (located in my timezone.)

Nachteile

No real cons actually. Had a problem once (which was related to my PG driver etc), the customer support helped me resolve it fairly quickly.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

- latest version of PostgreSQL available nearly immediately
- great performance
- easy-to-understand UI with enough power to do everything I needed
- straightforward solution, not excessively complicated
- ability to deploy into cloud provider of my choice, no lock-in
- clear pricing
- excellent support

Nachteile

- not possible to leverage free credits from cloud providers

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

It's incredibly easy to spin up a postgreSQL instance and start being productive. Everything from creating a secure password to SSL-certificates are handled automatically. Point in time backups make you confident to use and test without gambling hours of work and for the serious tests and development environments - spin up a replica by forking the database with the press of a button!

Nachteile

It is a bit expensive if you need more disk space, which isn't unusual when dealing with data and databases.

Vorteile

Lo que más me gusta es la facilidad de uso, poder trabajar de forma segura y rápido

Nachteile

No tengo ningún contra. Recomiendo el programa

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

graph of metrics
query statics
easy admin of users
the autimatic backups and restores
the upgrades of service plans is a very easy and autimatic
the agents of service desk are very efficent and friendly

Nachteile

can't watch logs of befores days
aiven dont have a panel to execute querys, i could execute querys without any administrator of postgresql from your platform
cant admin sessions, i could close to sessions without pgadmin

Vorteile

Ease of use, being able to upgrade, downgrade hardware as needed, great customer support, overall decent interface.

Nachteile

Hardware versus price is not great, especially compared to AWS, not great logging, seems difficult to customize, no auto scaling.

Vorteile

The confidence I have that the DB will be running, that if there is an update or upgrade I can (from the DB side) simply click a button to deploy it.

Nachteile

We are currently transitioning most of our app to k8s and the systems just don't seem to work super well with Digital Ocean's current solution. (We don't get VPC's and as such have issue with whitelisting correct IP's as they tend to change)

Vorteile

Console is easy to navigate. I didn't need a single tutorial to figure out what was where.

Nachteile

Monitoring, Performance measuring, and optimization tools are pretty non-existent

Vorteile

The best feature is how easy it is to get up and running. Once you've set up an instance, you literally (in our case) just had to copy-and-paste the database URL into our site's (Django-based) configuration. The fact that scaling the instances is so easy also makes it quite comfortable to just start with a small one and then upgrade it as your needs increase.

Nachteile

We had one or two cases where the instance was unreachable, even though the dashboard reported that it was up. Considering the price, this is pretty good for over a year of service with no redundancy, though. Also, automatically upgrading the PostgreSQL version is obviously a double-edged sword. An opt-out feature might be helpful. We once started getting some errors when the postgres-server version changed.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

The interface is easy to use and intuitive.

The remote replica option is saving the company time. In the past, it was hard to manage and configure the remote replicas using tools like Bucardo and PostgreSQL in RDS, which does not support binary replication (at least it didn't back then).

The replicas between the remote databases happen almost instantly.

Great support for extensions.

Nachteile

The chat support takes a long time to answer the questions but when they do, the answers are to the point and helpful.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Warum Aiven for PostgreSQL gewählt wurde

Zuvor genutzte Software

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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 :)

Vorteile

Ease of use, quick setup.
We easily migrated to cloud and don't have to manage PostgreSQL any more.

Nachteile

Not enough features and settings for PostgreSQL: for example: slow queries logs are missing and we have to monitor by third party tools.

Vorteile

The ease of deployment and the dashboard are super important to us and these guys seem to have put a lot of thought into building a toolset that works for devs.

Nachteile

I don't have anything useful to add here.

Vorteile

- the support provided during the sales cycle
- the exploration of possible options
- the platform is clear and user friendly
- great product, it took us a few hours to migrate from our database on premise to that on Aiven.

Nachteile

- the fact that we can only have Timescale Open Source features run on Aiven, and not the advanced features.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Aiven for PostgreSQL

Vorteile

It's clean, simple-to-use, and best of all, is serviced by very knowledgeable IT staff who can answer the finer details of our technical questions and make nuanced recommendations. The pricing plan is also friendlier than those offered by the bigger platforms.

Nachteile

It would be great if we can be on the trial plan too, and getting on it was a bit of a hassle, but otherwise not much complaints.

Vorteile

Availability and live migration feature is awesome

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

Performance is much higher than Amazon RDS

Nachteile

Failover can take quite a long time.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Warum Aiven for PostgreSQL gewählt wurde

Zuvor genutzte Software

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

Easy to use and manage for other users and device declaration

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Warum Aiven for PostgreSQL gewählt wurde

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Aiven for PostgreSQL

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

- 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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

nothing

Vorteile

simple to use, performant and reliable.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.)

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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).

Vorteile

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 :)

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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).

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

- 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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

Easy cloud based management of all database operational aspects.

Nachteile

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.