comment: Hello HN! I'm an engineer at Splitgraph and recently started learning Rust so I could make my first contribution to Seafowl [0], an early stage analytical database. Along the way I figured out a database hosting hack on GCP and wanted to share it with HN. It's a way to achieve "true" scale to zero database hosting that could be useful for certain side projects or spiky traffic situations.
A recurring problem I've faced with side projects is the need for Postgres, but no desire to deploy or maintain new instances. So when I learned GCP's "always free" tier includes serverless [1] I got curious to see if I could run a database.
While a lot of classic databases aren't usually a great fit for serverless, Seafowl separates compute, storage and catalog (catalog == a SQLite file of metadata). [2] Last month I was able to introduce GCS bucket compat to Seafowl, which enabled me to mount the catalog via gcsfuse
(i.e. an adapter that allows attaching