Aiven for PostgreSQL Reviews

- latest version of PostgreSQL available nearly immediately
- great performance
- easy-to-understand UI with enough power to do everything I needed
- straightforward solution, not excessively complicated
- ability to deploy into cloud provider of my choice, no lock-in
- clear pricing
- excellent support

- not possible to leverage free credits from cloud providers

The general ease of operation for:
- Spinning up new databases
- Scaling up
- Scaling down
- Migrating to a different region
- Restoring backups
Is really great. It's amazing how many features you get out of the box.
The plans with redundancy are also cool because you get full access to the slave as a read-only replica, this means you can run heavy select queries without putting load on the main database.
There is a very significant "it just works" factor to it, which is not something I would imagine myself saying about a database provider so easily.

They are not the cheapest
Monitoring/alerting options were a bit lackluste, but this has improved recently.

Not being able to copy from one gb to another easily or automatically

Good software for automating database operations, has good features to facilitate connections, completely secures data, and offers a free trial.

Sometimes problems occur in copying operations, this platform needs to be updated to increase work efficiency.

It's incredibly easy to spin up a postgreSQL instance and start being productive. Everything from creating a secure password to SSL-certificates are handled automatically. Point in time backups make you confident to use and test without gambling hours of work and for the serious tests and development environments - spin up a replica by forking the database with the press of a button!

It is a bit expensive if you need more disk space, which isn't unusual when dealing with data and databases.

The best thing are the no-downtime migrations and upgrades. The setup was quick and easy and since then no maintenance has been required. Customer service is great and pro-active. The dashboard works well.

As far as I can tell there's no way to set a separate billing email.

It would be nice to also see in the dashboard what's taking up most memory and disk space and to be able to set up alerts, such as if there are queries that take too long to execute.

- the support provided during the sales cycle
- the exploration of possible options
- the platform is clear and user friendly
- great product, it took us a few hours to migrate from our database on premise to that on Aiven.

- the fact that we can only have Timescale Open Source features run on Aiven, and not the advanced features.

I like how easy it is to create and manage Postgres instance using Aiven + it's not that expensive in comparison to other providers.

I would like to have more insights in query performance.

I have only used the PostgreSQL service so far and I really like how easy it is to start, fork en upgrade the service.

A great feature, and a must for us, is that you can choose on which cloud provider and location the service should be deployed.

We have been hosting our own PostgreSQL server for years and had to manage upgrades, backup and scaling on our own. And it feels great to finally leave that behind us and start using PostgreSQL as a service.

The support is great to. I have been in contact with the support using the chat feature and have been helped every time.

The official API client was a bit hard to understand at first.

Can't fault Aiven at all, great service, the exact services we require (postgres and elasticsearch) and always more than willing to help

While it is a managed service you do need to have at least a minimum of knowledge to setup and run the services on offer.

The interface is easy to use and intuitive.

The remote replica option is saving the company time. In the past, it was hard to manage and configure the remote replicas using tools like Bucardo and PostgreSQL in RDS, which does not support binary replication (at least it didn't back then).

The replicas between the remote databases happen almost instantly.

Great support for extensions.

The chat support takes a long time to answer the questions but when they do, the answers are to the point and helpful.

Performance is much higher than Amazon RDS

Failover can take quite a long time.

graph of metrics
query statics
easy admin of users
the autimatic backups and restores
the upgrades of service plans is a very easy and autimatic
the agents of service desk are very efficent and friendly

can't watch logs of befores days
aiven dont have a panel to execute querys, i could execute querys without any administrator of postgresql from your platform
cant admin sessions, i could close to sessions without pgadmin

The best feature is how easy it is to get up and running. Once you've set up an instance, you literally (in our case) just had to copy-and-paste the database URL into our site's (Django-based) configuration. The fact that scaling the instances is so easy also makes it quite comfortable to just start with a small one and then upgrade it as your needs increase.

We had one or two cases where the instance was unreachable, even though the dashboard reported that it was up. Considering the price, this is pretty good for over a year of service with no redundancy, though. Also, automatically upgrading the PostgreSQL version is obviously a double-edged sword. An opt-out feature might be helpful. We once started getting some errors when the postgres-server version changed.

Aiven makes it trival to move databases between cloud providers. The stickiest thing about any hyperscaler (AWS/Google/Azure) is your data - it's a PAIN to move. Aiven makes changing your cloud provider a literal point and shoot operation, something that could take weeks of planning trying to from RDS to Cloud SQL or the like.

A little more customization in the pricing would be nice (and the ability to run within a VPC instead of having to peer VPCs), but honestly there's very little I don't like about Aiven.

It was just super simple to start using it. The possibility to deploy the service to the same locations where we host our capacity was crucial for us.

Also as a nice plus, aiven has made their own Terraform provider which we also use to manage our capacity.

Option to create "Service Accounts" would be really nice. Currently all the API tokens are tied to actual user accounts and that might cause problems at some point.

But other than that there's not much not to like :)

The ease of deployment and the dashboard are super important to us and these guys seem to have put a lot of thought into building a toolset that works for devs.

I don't have anything useful to add here.

I like that is possible to deploy PostgreSQL within seconds. I also really like that is possible to upgrade to a minor or major version of PostgreSQL without a noticeable downtime. I like the offering of HA services. I like the great customer support.

That it is not possible to have customizable PostgreSQL logs. On our dedicated servers we customize this logs to show us querys that last longer than 5 seconds, currently this is not possible with Aiven.

Console is easy to navigate. I didn't need a single tutorial to figure out what was where.

Monitoring, Performance measuring, and optimization tools are pretty non-existent

Availability and live migration feature is awesome

Last time (couple weeks) it still cannot zoom to specific range of time in metric dashboard or i am wrong remember

It's efficient: no downtime during migration scale up/down
And easy to use!

Maybe an "in customer cloud" deployment for small business could be appreciable

Datacenters in multiple regions, multiple PostgreSQL versions. General high level of availability. Support is helpful and pretty fast (located in my timezone.)

No real cons actually. Had a problem once (which was related to my PG driver etc), the customer support helped me resolve it fairly quickly.

It works. It seems stable. We hope someones is handling all the version updates and patches for us, but we don't get a lot of visibility into that.

It's expensive and I'm not sure how much value Aiven is providing us. We consider just running Postgres on our own cloud almost every day.

Ease of use, being able to upgrade, downgrade hardware as needed, great customer support, overall decent interface.

Hardware versus price is not great, especially compared to AWS, not great logging, seems difficult to customize, no auto scaling.