Ha, this is weird. I noticed this earlier today in Fly docs and was surprised I'd missed it on HN (as surely it would've appeared). I didn't realise it was new.
My second reaction was that it's crazy there's 'Postgres by Fly' and 'Postgres by Supabase' in the sidebar. There isn't even an (obvious, or that I noticed) comparison offered. If I'm deploying an app on Fly and want postgres, what do I use?
(Personally I think if I use Fly and want a dbms I'll use LiteFS distributed SQLite, and if you do want postgres I think the answer is that Fly vs Supabase is basically unmanaged vs. managed.)
Can you ELI5 the difference? Especially any sharp edges + pros/cons. I suspect I'm not alone coming from managed postgres (e.g. heroku or similar) and am open minded to unmanaged but don't want to unknowingly make a poor infra decision.
Managed database offerings give you a Postgres URL and you just go to town. They take care of scaling and monitoring. Fly Postgres is automated, but not managed: our tooling will boot up a Postgres cluster for you, at a specified size, but it's not going to do so much database-level monitoring that you can forget about the database and just assume it's always healthy regardless of your usage.
If your expectations are set from Heroku's Postgres, you want a managed database. You're going to notice that Fly.io people aren't going to push you to Fly Postgres. You want to be reasonably comfortable with clustered Postgres to choose our unmanaged Postgres over Supabase's --- maybe not so comfortable that you'd set it up yourself (it's automated, after all, and does a bunch of cluster orchestration for you) --- but enough to do your own monitoring, sizing, and provisioning.
Lots and lots and lots of people rely on Fly Postgres, and it's a reasonable option. If I was doing a low-level project, like an individual service in a larger ensemble, or an expiriment or side project or a spike, I'd probably use Fly Postgres. But if I was launching a whole product on top of Fly.io, and a Postgres database was my system of record, I'd want Supabase.
My second reaction was that it's crazy there's 'Postgres by Fly' and 'Postgres by Supabase' in the sidebar. There isn't even an (obvious, or that I noticed) comparison offered. If I'm deploying an app on Fly and want postgres, what do I use?
(Personally I think if I use Fly and want a dbms I'll use LiteFS distributed SQLite, and if you do want postgres I think the answer is that Fly vs Supabase is basically unmanaged vs. managed.)