Show HN: OtterTune – Automated Database Tuning Service for RDS MySQL/Postgres
Hi! This looks really cool and I like that you&#x27;ve published&#x2F;presented at VLDB.<p>I&#x27;m a little curious why AWS is free&#x2F;cheap, but anything other than AWS ends up in the &quot;Enterprise, contact us for pricing&quot; bucket. It might simply be based on your costs. I don&#x27;t know if the on-prem stuff is expensive since your software needs to be in the same datacenter or if it&#x27;s just a pricing differentiator.<p>I&#x27;m also wondering if you&#x27;ve thought of going the DBaaS route. It looks like AWS is charging an ~80% premium for RDS over regular on-demand instances. If you&#x27;re managing a fleet of them and getting lower pricing (through committed-use discounts and negotiation) you could potentially get good margin there. For example, AWS charges $280&#x2F;mo (on-demand) for an M5.2xLarge and $500&#x2F;mo (on-demand) for the same instance for MySQL RDS (single AZ). So Amazon is already asking for an additional $220 and then you&#x27;d like $90&#x2F;database ($450 &#x2F; 5 databases on the standard plan). It seems like there might be more opportunity in the DBaaS markup than in trying to convince someone to use your tuning engine.<p>From your video, it doesn&#x27;t sound like OtterTune does this, but it might be worth thinking about: maybe not just tuning the database, but also offering suggestions on potential anti-patterns happening. For example, if someone has code that should be using connection pools and isn&#x27;t, it could be helpful to present it as something potentially important. Likewise, let&#x27;s say that there are unindexed queries. Detecting that and recommending solutions is helpful. That seems like it could offer ongoing benefit.<p>Speaking of ongoing benefit, would there be a lot of benefit to paying for more than one month? In the 5 minute video, it showed the configuration stabilizing pretty quickly once it reached a good place. Assuming that my access patterns remain relatively the same, it seems like I could just continue with that configuration. Maybe I could sign up for one month every year to get a check-up. This isn&#x27;t meant to be a criticism. It&#x27;s more that I&#x27;ve seen so many customers exploit holes in SaaS pricing. If you&#x27;re counting on recurring revenue, what happens if a customer notices that after a day they don&#x27;t need the knobs tuned anymore? Can I get that $450 5-DB plan and run it on 5 databases on Monday, remove it from those 5 databases on Tuesday and apply it to 5 new databases on Tuesday (effectively getting 150 databases per month for the price of 5)? Or maybe there is a need to be tuning the configuration hourly&#x2F;daily (though that seems less likely).<p>I do like the idea of auto-tuned knobs and it seems like a great service. I guess it&#x27;s just hard to try if, like me, you&#x27;re not on AWS. I&#x27;m sure that most people are so I&#x27;m not suggesting it&#x27;s an inappropriate restriction for the free tier. Really cool and congrats on VLDB!