Absolutely. I’ve been a customer for many years and it’s always been a pleasure to interact with such a simple, transparent and “to the point” UI. The fact that they are a tiny team also bumps it up the list for me.

well, they shut this down probably because they cannot afford to keep a product that bring little revenue. I never heard of AWS retiring a product (I am excluding ancient stuff like VPC classic and SimpleDB, both had an upgrade path to something superior)

AWS can continue to provide you a product that consistently loses money because they have a gazillion million dollars.

They have the ability to kill comeptition by losing money until they go broke first.

For AWS such services bring network effect, and pay back in other segments of ecosystem.

AWS is Big Tech. It locks you in, and it's not easy to guard your users' privacy against them. Smaller providers (and also local in the case of 84codes) are preferred.

> and it's not easy to guard your users' privacy against them

Source?

> Smaller providers (and also local in the case of 84codes) are preferred

AWS have a reputation and stability to keep because half of the internet, governments, banks, etc. rely on them. If a small provider makes a mistake, or goes bankrupt due to unforseen circumstances, you're left holding the bag on your own.

You're being polite asking for a source. The source will, as it always does, turn out to be "some random stuff I read on the internet don't know where but everybody knows this is true".

Insert LLM-generated variation thereof.

Whit AWS you probably have to hire a decent engineer who knows how to build stuff the right way (never touch the dashboards, do all through well-tested, declarative, repeatable IaaC, set up proper replication and backups, preemptively simulating the outages, and so on).

But unless you need a complex control plane or highly dynamic scaling on a daily basis you also can do exact same thing with any non-cloud provider (and a CDN). Order some bare metal, roll out, enjoy - if it goes bad, order bare metal from someone else, redeploy to it, restore from backups, and recover in about the same time (half a day) it takes AWS to fix us-east-1 when it fails. It also probably will save a lot of money (NATgw bills alone) in the long term.

If AWS goes down, and it does, you're still left holding the bag, because no one customer is important enough for them to actually support. You can leave sad voicemails for your customer account representative, and pretty much nothing else.

The idea of AWS as some kind of bag-holding partner is risible. They're a machine that helps convert capex to opex. Any systems services they may offer along the way are purely secondary.

> If AWS goes down, and it does

Rarely. And never if you've setup your environment across multiple regions.

Evidently not, as few are willing to pay a large premium for them.

Large premium? LOL! It is AWS you pay a large premium for.

Evidently? Clarify please.

I imagine they meant: evidently not, because ElephantSQL is shutting down their service.

SimpleDB disappeared off the marketing pages - but I don't think it got shut down in reality until 2020 maybe? It was easily 5+ years after DynamoDB came along. There was definitely a period where there was little SimpleDB availability publicly but on the backend it kept working.

Would love it if someone had more of the detailed history.

SimpleDB still works for my company's AWS account. There's been no announcement of a shutdown that I've seen (and I check occasionally since it's almost entirely disappeared from most of AWS's documentation).

Haha.. That matches what I experienced. It literally disappeared from everywhere but actually just kept on running.

There’s no such thing as zero cost to development teams. Who patches the security vulnerabilities? Who answers esoteric customer questions for customers with premium support contracts?

Fully agree with this sentiment it's very much our focus and goal at Crunchy Data with one big thing I'd add-great support.

I recall seeing them crop up in the early days of building and running Heroku Postgres, they were a very very early managed service provider. To my knowledge they never seemed to grow to massive scale but were a steady business (though I don't know any of the details for sure). That they were still around for over a decade is a testament from a lot of others.

The service is good but it was definitely not clear upfront about the postgresql version you were getting when selecting a region / provider.