We’re using fly for a couple of minor things, our core app is still with heroku because managed, point-in-time-restore database integrity is everything.
I see there have been some chats around this in the past. What’s the current state of play for using an external PG database with fly?
We’re an early stage company so Aassume that we are with Heroku for a reason - literally every minute spent managing a service that we don’t have to is time that isn’t spent building our product. What are our best options for using an external DB with Fly? (We won’t need intense multi-region stuff, we’re considering moving to ~3 regions from our current 1, and even staying at 1 is acceptable).
I would love to try out something like Supabase but I’d like to know more about simple best practices for not shooting ourselves in the foot or adding a maintenance burden that is obscured by the sales copy.
There are tons of managed database options. Fly has Postgres (somewhat) built-in but it’s not as full featured as actual database server vendors.
You can use everything from AWS RDS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, etc. I highly recommend Aiven for all managed DB stuff as they can run in just about every cloud and have the most features and database types.
Thanks, but I’m looking for some more information than that. Previous posts (linked above) discuss things like optimum latency, getting the right data centers, etc.
I would hope that the Fly team have a front-runner that could be recommended, or a “simple as possible” configuration that can be pointed to.
There’s nothing special about it, just use the DB connection credentials you get from the managed DB provider. Pick a region for your database and pick the closest Fly region for you app to minimize latency. Aiven has the most regions so you can find a match there.
Also Supabase is a frontend/app platform around a Postgres instance but managed databases are not their primary offering.
I know, but Kurt indicated this might become a more official path, I’m trying to get an update or recommendations from the team on if anything has progressed here, or in other areas of managed postgres with Fly.
@kurt: Our long term goal is to “give” Postgres to a company like Supabase that is focused on a really nice dev UX for postgres itself. The launch story would be the same, but their tooling would handle things like point in time restores, forks, etc. You can use them right now with Fly apps, if you want.
