Individual PostgreSQL instances to everyone — Nhost

Today we’re excited to announce that all new projects get their own dedicated Postgres instance with root access. It's finally possible to connect directly to the database with your favorite Postgres client.

When we launched Nhost v2, all databases were hosted and managed on Amazon RDS. The reason why we started with RDS was twofold:

having the most crucial component of all infrastructure managed and scaled by an experienced team on a mature product seemed to be an excellent idea. We wouldn’t have to manage and operate it ourselves.

with v2, all services (e.g., GraphQL, Authentication, and Storage) were moved to Kubernetes because of its flexibility and extensibility. Running a stateful component like Postgres on Kubernetes comes with a complete set of challenges of their own and we wanted to focus on running the stateless components well.

Kubernetes is a complex piece of technology to master but once you do it, it gives infrastructure teams superpowers. All projects running on Nhost have the option to scale vertically (adding resources to existing instances) and horizontally (adding new instances/replicas) on each service individually (GraphQL, Auth, Storage, and now Postgres, but here only vertically). This means your projects can cope with the load of your application, whether sustained or due to spikes in demand while also providing high availability of your products if the underlying infrastructure is misbehaving or faulty. If a node goes down, your services are almost instantly moved to a healthy one. This is the reason why we were able to easily cope with 2M+ requests in less than 24h when Midnight Society launched - it just worked without any manual work from us.

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