DBaaS Review

TL;DR: go check out DBaaS Review and let me know what you think.

A couple of years ago I started tracking DBaaS prices in a spreadsheet. Besides AWS RDS, it just seemed like there were more and more good options being announced each month. Finally in 2019 I cleaned up my data and turned it into an interactive calculator on this website.

There were a few limitations with the simplistic approach, though. I was originally interested in the sub-$50/month market segment, but many interesting offerings are well above that. When you add more dimensions (like regions, replicas, and commitment) the number of potential options balloons. It was no longer feasible to keep the data in a static single page application.

I bought dbaasreview.com and deployed new static site to Cloudflare pages, later to Render. I investigated using Cloudflare workers for the API, but for now deploying a separate API from a separate repository was more straightforward. I’m using Render’s free tier, so the main drawback is that the API shuts off after a few minutes of inactivity.

The vast majority of the work is importing all of the different product plans into a single unified database that powers the API behind the calculator page. I spent two days puzzling over Azure’s pricing API, I’m not looking forward to doing the same for AWS and GCP. Since the data is pretty small (< 5MB) and read-only, the API uses a SQLite database deployed alongside the application, ironically. If and when the project outgrows this, I will scale up API replicas.

Anyway, it’s been fun and interesting to build and maybe will turn into a consulting gig or something, who knows.

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