Evaluator feedback sought: How important are specific Cloud options on free tier?

Aiven Community
1

One of the things you tend to think about as a company that offers a free version of your thing is how to lower the costs of it, so you can continue to offer a free version of your thing. :wink:

An idea we are somewhat kicking around is letting folks on free tier choose regions / locations, rather than specific cloud providers / availability zones, to give us some flexibility to swap those things out as prices and/or commitments shift around. (NOTE: This would not be the case for any of our paid plans, which would continue to run on whatever options were chosen at service creation time.)

We want to try and gather up some feedback data around this to factor into the discussion / decision, so here are some questions for all y’all free tier folks:

  1. How important is it to you when evaluating a Cloud-based service to be able to know “under the hood” the specific Cloud provider and availability zone it’s in (and why)?

  2. How disruptive would it be for you were an existing free service of yours to be migrated to another cloud provider behind the scenes? And if the answer to that is “Supremely” :wink: what sort of heads-up would you need about this and how soon beforehand?

Thanks so much for any input on this!

2

There are certainly cases it could matter - but chances are most of those don’t relate to DigitalOcean, so irrelevant to current free tier.

For example, it’d be nice to have in-cloud data transfer between existing services and a free service, but that seems like something that merits paying, a bit at least. If have an VM in GCP Moncks Corner, South Carolina (us-east1), it may be beneficial to be able to get something in GCP in the same region (specific availability zones is definitely into the “if you want it, you should pay for it” area). Network locality could also matter for latency.

By comparison, with ElephantSQL you could pick the cloud provider to an extent, but which cloud provider was offered in each location varied, so you were restricted in that respect. And you had far less space to play with, too.

If the DNS switches well there wouldn’t be much of an issue, maybe for longer-term connections but you have to deal with potential drops anyway.

Different providers have different policies and you might feasibly have content on one that’s potentially not permitted on the other (by their rules, or yours as the client due to governance/HIPPA/etc.), but again that’s an “if you need this, pay for it” matter.

1 Like