Prisma Postgres – Runs on bare metal and unikernels
In this technical retrospective (2024), @gniting shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 284 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 150 comments
If I already have a postgres operator setup on Kubernetes - what additional benefits is this getting me?
Right now super fast start times aren't really needed since it's a database that I expect to be running for a while - ms vs 30s is fine. It's easier to setup a test database on the same machine I'm running automated tests so that may not be a good usecase either.
I'm glad that they've made improvements to startup speed and size of the containers which would be good if it's open sourced, but I don't know if this is good as a paid service if you already have an easy way of setting up new clusters in k8s.
Last time I checked, Firecracker didn't have a very compelling I/O story, which made it in my opinion not completely adequate for running Postgres (or any other database).
In contrast, other similar VMM seem to have a better one, like Cloud Hypervisor [1]. Why then FC and not CH? (I've nothing against FC, actually love it and have been using it, but it appears not being the best I/O wise).
[1]: https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor ↗
Prisma is an absolute joke. I remember hearing so much about it with the hype train, and I looked into it, and it's an absolute catastrophe with a very beautiful homepage. There are GitHub issues where the creator is arguing with people about not supporting foreign key constraints or something, and he didnt understand the use case (cant remember specifics right now, but this is where I immediately noped right out)
Anyone complaining here just isn't the target user. People who need an always available but zero maintenance and low usage seems to be the target user?
It's not every day you get to launch a hosted Postgres service that has something fundamentally new to offer. That's what we have done with Prisma Postgres, and I'm incredibly excited for it.
We are using Firecracker and unikernals to deliver true scale-to-zero without cold-starts. Happy to go into more detail if anyone is interested.