December 2023 Summaries

Koyeb has introduced new Small, Medium, and Large PostgreSQL databases, which are currently in private preview, designed for production workloads with up to 4GB of RAM, fully managed, and highly available. These serverless databases offer potential savings of up to 88% compared to traditional databases, particularly due to their auto-sleep feature which reduces costs when databases are not in use 24/7. Pricing starts at $20.89 per month for the Small database with 1GB of RAM, while additional storage, writes, and reads incur separate charges. The service maintains a forever free tier with 50 active hours per month, and while still in private preview, these new database sizes will not be charged until February 1st. Users are encouraged to sign up through Koyeb's control panel to begin deploying their database services for free and provide feedback to help shape the product.

Kong Konnect is an API lifecycle management platform designed to streamline connectivity between APIs and microservices, utilizing a cloud-hosted control plane and a user-managed data plane within a preferred network environment. In a demonstration of Kong Konnect's capabilities, the platform was deployed globally in under five minutes using Koyeb's infrastructure, which supports quick multi-region deployments, low-latency global edge networking, and Dockerfile deployments. Kong's application architecture involves a distributed system of microservices in Node.js and Go, stored in a monorepo, with a Kong API Gateway providing REST endpoints and security features. The deployment across six locations, including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Paris, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo, showcased the edge network's ability to ensure low latency by routing requests through the nearest core locations. Koyeb facilitates easy deployment from sub-directories and the use of Terraform for automating deployment configurations, enabling Kong to create separate deployments for US and European services swiftly. The demonstration highlighted Koyeb's features such as multi-region deployments, edge networking, service mesh, and continuous deployments, allowing organizations to deploy applications worldwide efficiently.

Qwigo, a creative web and mobile development company, sought a high-performance and cost-effective solution to build an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service, ultimately choosing Koyeb for its managed infrastructure capabilities. Koyeb, utilizing Firecracker-powered microVMs, offered Qwigo unmatched performance and a strong price-performance ratio, facilitating their CPU-intensive OCR operations with ease. The platform's features, including multi-region deployments across the US and Europe, native secrets management, and seamless integration with databases like Neon, met all of Qwigo's requirements. Qwigo highlighted Koyeb's ease of deployment, which allowed them to launch their service worldwide in just minutes, and appreciated the platform's built-in metrics for monitoring application performance.

Managed databases, or Database as a Service (DBaaS), offer significant advantages for developers by allowing them to focus on core projects without the complexities of database management, such as setup, maintenance, scaling, and security compliance. This guide evaluates a variety of managed database offerings, highlighting popular platforms like Aiven, CockroachDB, Crunchy Data, DigitalOcean, FaunaDB, Heroku, Instaclustr, Koyeb, MongoDB Atlas, Neon, PlanetScale, Supabase, Upstash, and YugabyteDB, each offering unique features and pricing models to cater to different needs. These platforms provide scalable, secure, and globally deployable solutions, often with free tiers to help users test the services before committing to paid plans. Choosing the right DBaaS provider involves considering factors like compatibility with standard database management systems, global deployment capabilities, pricing, and features such as automated backups and rollback capabilities. Additionally, the shift towards serverless platforms like Koyeb enables developers to deploy applications and databases with ease, offering scalability without the burdens of traditional infrastructure management.

Koyeb has introduced new Eco Instance types that offer an affordable solution for global deployment, starting at $1.61 per month, and have enhanced the Free Instance by doubling its RAM and enabling deployments in Washington, D.C., and Frankfurt. The Eco Instances provide more RAM per core, making them suitable for development and non-production environments, such as testing and prototyping. These instances are backed by AMD EPYC Milan processors and include platform features like auto-healing, horizontal scaling, and global load-balancing. While Standard Instances, which offer more CPU and storage, are available worldwide, Eco Instances are currently restricted to Frankfurt and Washington, D.C., with plans for expansion to Asia. Koyeb also plans to introduce features like autoscaling, scale-to-zero, and high-performance NVMe storage to enhance the serverless experience.