> I'm a little curious why AWS is free/cheap, but anything other than AWS ends up in the "Enterprise, contact us for pricing" bucket. It might simply be based on your costs. I don't know if the on-prem stuff is expensive since your software needs to be in the same datacenter or if it's just a pricing differentiator.
The expensive part for us about on-prem is the amount of custom code that we have to write for the agent to deal with how the organization maintains their config files. For example, one customer that we talked maintained TerraForm files for their MySQL confs in Github. So we had to modify the Github repo, push to main, that would then trigger a Github action that then pushed the update to database. Then we had to know when the updated config was deployed so that we could bounce the system (if it required a restart). Restarting the DBMS is tricky too, since everybody does it differently.
> I'm also wondering if you've thought of going the DBaaS route.
There is a lot to running a DBaaS (backups, configs, upgrades). At this point I think it would be very difficult to compete with Amazon/MSFT/Google/Oracle/etc if it was just stock Postgres/MySQL. You need a killer feature
> Speaking of ongoing benefit, would there be a lot of benefit to paying for more than one month?
You are asking about a floating license. This is a potential for enterprise customers. For now we track RDS databases by their ARN. So if you try to switch that on OtterTune, it treats it as a new database. This is necessary to make sure that the ML models don't freak out if there is a dramatic change all of a sudden.
The demo video was with TPC-C. The workload is stable. We've seen workloads that evolve a lot over the course of months, so it is unlikely that the same configuration would be optimal during this entire period.
> I guess it's just hard to try if, like me, you're not on AWS.
free/cheaper network egress traffic and you will beat RDS.
See the RDS costing is not fully transparent. you pay CRAZY LOT for backups - backup to s3 is impossible, except in a weird parquet way. This is a cost lock-in.
you again pay CRAZY LOT for network egress. so i cant use a Vercel app with RDS. ill just spend a lot on network.
these two features and anybody will switch:
1. cheap network traffic
2. cheap backups.
charge me 20% above RDS (for the base machine) and ill pay happily.
> I'm a little curious why AWS is free/cheap, but anything other than AWS ends up in the "Enterprise, contact us for pricing" bucket. It might simply be based on your costs. I don't know if the on-prem stuff is expensive since your software needs to be in the same datacenter or if it's just a pricing differentiator.
The expensive part for us about on-prem is the amount of custom code that we have to write for the agent to deal with how the organization maintains their config files. For example, one customer that we talked maintained TerraForm files for their MySQL confs in Github. So we had to modify the Github repo, push to main, that would then trigger a Github action that then pushed the update to database. Then we had to know when the updated config was deployed so that we could bounce the system (if it required a restart). Restarting the DBMS is tricky too, since everybody does it differently.
> I'm also wondering if you've thought of going the DBaaS route.
There is a lot to running a DBaaS (backups, configs, upgrades). At this point I think it would be very difficult to compete with Amazon/MSFT/Google/Oracle/etc if it was just stock Postgres/MySQL. You need a killer feature
> Speaking of ongoing benefit, would there be a lot of benefit to paying for more than one month?
You are asking about a floating license. This is a potential for enterprise customers. For now we track RDS databases by their ARN. So if you try to switch that on OtterTune, it treats it as a new database. This is necessary to make sure that the ML models don't freak out if there is a dramatic change all of a sudden.
The demo video was with TPC-C. The workload is stable. We've seen workloads that evolve a lot over the course of months, so it is unlikely that the same configuration would be optimal during this entire period.
> I guess it's just hard to try if, like me, you're not on AWS.
Reach out to us and I'm happy to talk to you about your setup: https://ottertune.com/contact
> Really cool and congrats on VLDB!
The science comes first.