I do host a medium-sized PostgreSQL database, but i would love not to. I need the control you won't have with a cloud offering (you can't install extensions) but i don't want to do all the other steps, and you always have the fear that backups do not work correctly.
And i am not the only one hosting it by my own, many people are using self-hosting PaaS like dokku, flynn or caprover. And all these solutions have a common problem, they all need to reinvent the database as a service layer. What is currently really missing is a good open-source PostgreSQL as a service appliance, something "simple" like Heroku. There have been attempts like Elephant Shed, but they all try to do too much and therefore fail in adoption as they never reach stability. Or people are forced to use complex solutions like patroni which is doing many things, but if something fails you have no clue what to do.
So what is really missing?
1. A simple old-school PostgreSQL vm image
2. Built on a copy-on-write file system to clone production environments like https://postgres.ai/ and Heroku for development reasons which will not really need any storage space.
3. A built-in backup solution like pgBackRest storing the files encrypted in some cloud storage (and restore options!)
4. It does not need a complex ui or inspection/monitoring software, there are many solutions you can run on a different machine.
5. Replication, Auto-Failover etc. are hard just make it a single server which you scale vertically, if you need horizontal scaling you have very specific needs, there can't be a one size fits all solution, so don't even try it. And a real bare-metal server with nvme disks has a lot of power it's insane how fast it is compared to cloud hosted databases.
And i am not the only one hosting it by my own, many people are using self-hosting PaaS like dokku, flynn or caprover. And all these solutions have a common problem, they all need to reinvent the database as a service layer. What is currently really missing is a good open-source PostgreSQL as a service appliance, something "simple" like Heroku. There have been attempts like Elephant Shed, but they all try to do too much and therefore fail in adoption as they never reach stability. Or people are forced to use complex solutions like patroni which is doing many things, but if something fails you have no clue what to do.
So what is really missing?
1. A simple old-school PostgreSQL vm image 2. Built on a copy-on-write file system to clone production environments like https://postgres.ai/ and Heroku for development reasons which will not really need any storage space. 3. A built-in backup solution like pgBackRest storing the files encrypted in some cloud storage (and restore options!) 4. It does not need a complex ui or inspection/monitoring software, there are many solutions you can run on a different machine. 5. Replication, Auto-Failover etc. are hard just make it a single server which you scale vertically, if you need horizontal scaling you have very specific needs, there can't be a one size fits all solution, so don't even try it. And a real bare-metal server with nvme disks has a lot of power it's insane how fast it is compared to cloud hosted databases.