Bunny Database

https://bunny.net/blog/meet-bunny-database-the-sql-service-that-just-works/

by dabinat • 6 months ago

322 132 6 months ago

pier257• 6 months ago

Pretty cool. I’ve been using Bunny as a Cloudflare replacement for a couple of years and my experience has been flawless.

jsheard3• 6 months ago

It does feel like they're spreading their resources pretty thin though, the S3-compatible interface for their file storage has been "coming soon" since 2022.

kilroy123• 6 months ago

I, too, have the same worry.

pier257• 6 months ago

Yeah that's true. The lack of S3 compat hasn't been an issue for me personally but it would be nice to have it for their edge storage.

pousada• 6 months ago

That’s the problem with keeping a public roadmap - in the end everyone is unhappy and also not really more informed

notrab5• 6 months ago

S3 is currently in closed preview with some users. It's quite easy to get added for those keen to try it. More using it and providing feedback, the quicker it'll become public preview.

cobertos• 6 months ago

Huh, how? Did you have to modify your site a lot to do switch?

I tried to test it out as a CDN replacement for Cloudflare but the workflow was a lot different. Instead of just using DNS to put it in front of another website and proxy the requests (the "orange cloud" button), I had to upload all the assets to Bunny and then rewrite the URLs in my app. Was kind of a pain

pier257• 6 months ago

They do have the CDN proxy too. Not sure when it was implemented though.

It's a similar process to Cloudflare. Point the NS to them and enable the proxy for a domain or subdomain.

Daegalus• 6 months ago

I have been using them for over a year. THey have the same flow as Cloudflare, point domain to thier CDN, set CDN Pull Zone to target your server. I havent had to do anything.

They even support websockets.

Why they cant do is the TUnnel stuff, or at least fake it. I have ipv6 servers, and I can't have the IPv4 Bunny traffic go to the ipv6 only sources.

victorbjorklund4• 6 months ago

It should work as a drop in. You can just proxy your website. You don’t need to upload anything to Bunny (but you can if you want).

ForHackernews• 6 months ago

This sounds a lot like https://turso.tech/ ? Unless I misunderstand, they're both pitching SQLite-for-the-cloud.

Squarex• 6 months ago

Yes, they mention they use libsql. Don't know why I should use them and not the product by the actual libsql authors.

pier257• 6 months ago

An advantage is the integration with other Bunny services like containers etc.

Also, not sure about now, but historically Turso didn't have to best uptime.

PhilippGille• 6 months ago

Some European companies migrate their dependencies from US clouds to European ones. Turso is registered in Delaware. Bunny HQ is in Slovenia. Different data related policies apply.

o_m• 6 months ago

Bunny has their own infra while Turso relies on a cloud provider (AWS) which is unfortunately a no-go for many European companies

notrab5• 6 months ago

turso deprecated their edge replica offering when they went all-in on rewriting sqlite so bunny fills a nice void here. while turso didn't pull the plug for existing customers, new customers were left looking for alternatives with edge replica (that couldn't replicate on-device), and bunny does a nice job here.

turso also made it so your primary had to be in one location, but bunny will move it around based on latency on next boot.

m_nalikowski4• 6 months ago

Marek from bunny.net here. Another advantage is our global network: Bunny Database is available in 41 regions, so if your app has global users (or users in specific locations), you can avoid workarounds to hide latency from the DB.

We actually ran a benchmark to see how read latency degrades with distance from the database: https://bunny.net/blog/how-database-location-affects-far-awa...

darylteo• 6 months ago

Bunny is more like Cloudflare. Database is just 1 part of their offering. They're doing full service edge compute, storage and CDN.

4star3star• 6 months ago

Why choose this over Cloudflare D1?

nickorlow• 6 months ago

Not a technical reason, but given Cloudflare's recent business practices where they hold you hostage if you don't upgrade to an enterprise plan are a pretty good reason to avoid imo.

jsheard3• 6 months ago

For one they're EU-based, which may be a selling point if you're inclined to divest from US tech when possible.

pier257• 6 months ago

Cloudflare IPs might not work in Spain during football matches :)

It looks like there might be issues in Italy too.

benjymo• 6 months ago

Some ISPs have bad peering with Cloudflare (e.g. Deutsche Telekom). Not Cloudflares fault but it makes it a bad choice if your customers are in Germany.

And Cloudflare is an american company.

amelius• 6 months ago

Good question, the cloudflare speedtest has a bunny in it.

Nnnes• 6 months ago

Disclaimer: I have not used either product; I have used a number of Cloudflare's (mostly free tier) offerings.

In addition to the other points brought up, it looks like pricing strongly favors Bunny once you're outside of Cloudflare's free tier.

Per billion rows read: Bunny $0.30, Cloudflare $1.00 (first 25B/month free)

Per million rows written: Bunny $0.30, Cloudflare $1.00 (first 50M/month free)

Per GB stored: Bunny $0.10/region, Cloudflare $0.75 (5GB free)

Bunny also has a lot better region selection, 41 available vs. Cloudflare's 6 (see https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/configuration/data-loca...). Even though Bunny charges storage per region used where Cloudflare doesn't, Bunny still comes out cheaper with 7 regions selected. Bunny lets you choose how many and which regions to replicate across; Cloudflare's region replication is an on/off toggle that is in beta and requires you to use "the new Sessions API" (I don't know what this entails).

The main reason I haven't tried out D1 is that it locks you into using Workers to access the database. Bunny says they have an HTTP API.

I plan to stick with VPSes for compute and storage, but I do like seeing someone (other than Amazon) challenge Cloudflare on their huge array of fun toys for devs to play with.

victorbjorklund4• 6 months ago

It’s not an american company.

dabinat• 6 months ago

Small companies often have much better technical support than large companies where you just get lost in the system. One of the reasons I moved away from R2 was that it was impossible to contact anyone about the serious issues I had with the product. I’m using Bunny for CDN and have found them to be very responsive.

bvogelzang• 6 months ago

Pricing Details:

  While in public preview, Bunny Database is free.

  When idle, Bunny Database only incurs storage costs. One primary region is charged continuously, while read replicas only add storage costs when serving traffic (metered by the hour).

  Reads - $0.30 per billion rows
  Writes - $0.30 per million rows
  Storage - $0.10 per GB per active region (monthly)

wahnfrieden4• 6 months ago

The best thing about their pricing is that you can prepay. So if you have a runaway cost, it can stop before you run up a 5 or 6 figure bill, unlike Azure/AWS/GCP/CF.

miyuru• 6 months ago

Their CDN has a minimum $1 charge.

I was testing IPv6 origin support (they don’t support it), and they billed me $2 for a couple of test requests. I was testing at the end of the month.

With other providers, this would have cost only a few cents.

replwoacause• 6 months ago

Is this good for write heavy loads or does it face the same constraints as regular SQLite?

m_nalikowski4• 6 months ago

Marek from bunny.net here. Bunny Database works best for read-heavy use cases with fewer concurrent writes. Like SQLite, it follows a single-writer model, so there’s one writer at a time per database.

koakuma-chan2• 6 months ago

Why couldn't they just use SQLite, and not libSQL?

chungy• 6 months ago

LibSQL doesn't look anywhere close to active enough to consider it for production IMO.

Just compare the most recent commits from LibSQL: https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql/commits/main/

To those of SQLite: https://sqlite.org/src/timeline

One of these looks like a healthy and actively maintained project. The other isn't quite dead, but it's limping along.

jpeeler• 6 months ago

Your activity comparison isn't wrong, but it's because they are focused on doing a complete rewrite instead of focusing on the libSQL fork.

https://turso.tech/blog/we-will-rewrite-sqlite-and-we-are-go...

zackify• 6 months ago

why this over turso or litestream + read replicas?

drmajormccheese• 6 months ago

This is not a database of bunnies

sockaddr• 6 months ago

That's the only reason that I clicked.

philipwhiuk• 6 months ago

Especially after httpstatus.cat and the animal game the other day.

I've been had :(

m4200• 6 months ago

Accurate, but missing required punctuation of at least 1 grawlix of length 4 and 2 interrobangs

kogasa240p• 6 months ago

Seconded

CalRobert• 6 months ago

I hear one of them owes money all over town.

abanana• 6 months ago

But at least the bunny eating a cookie is cute.

mchusma• 6 months ago

I have used multiple s3 and cdn replacements, and bunny is my favorite. Excited to see a database product in the mix.

gordonhart• 6 months ago

Same, it's nice to use a no-BS CDN for personal projects (e.g. https://atlasof.space/). Their pricing is good and I actually appreciate that they have no free tier so that there's no "oh shit" moment when you suddenly exceed it and owe real $$$ (looking at you, Netlify). I probably won't use their database feature but I'll for sure keep using their CDN if they can keep things as straightforward as they currently are.

rawgabbit• 6 months ago

It seems Bunny is competing with Cloudflare. They offer very similar services including CDN, video streaming, databases etc.

endymion-light• 6 months ago

Looks cool, I need an alternative to my supabase set-up for little web tools, so i'll check it out!

throwaway894345• 6 months ago

Not every project needs Postgres, and that’s okay. Sometimes you just want a simple, reliable database that you can spin up quickly and build on, without worrying it’ll hit your wallet like an EC2.

Isn't the operational burden of SQLite the main selling point over Postgres (not one I subscribe to, but that's neither here nor there)? If it's managed, why do I care if it's SQLite or Postgres? If anything, I would expect Postgres to be the friendlier option, since you won't have to worry about eventually discovering that you actually need some feature even if you don't need it at the start of your project. Maybe there are projects that implement SQLite on top of Postgres so you can gradually migrate away from SQLite if you need Postgres features eventually?

m_nalikowski4• 6 months ago

Marek here from bunny.net. We’re not saying SQLite is universally better than Postgres. The trade-off we’re optimizing for is cost model and operational simplicity.

Even as a managed service, Postgres DBaaS still tends to push users into capacity planning, instance tiers, and paying for idle headroom. Using a SQLite-compatible engine lets us offer a truly usage-based model with affordable read replication and minimal idle costs.

the__alchemist• 6 months ago

Bun alert!

tad_tough_anne• 6 months ago

People need to know!

(Context: <https://xkcd.com/1871/>.)

grugdev42• 6 months ago

Maybe I'm not the target market for this, but how hard is it REALLY to manage a RDBMS?

Any Linux distro can have MySQL or Postgres installed in less than five minutes and works out of the box

Even a single core VPS can handle lots of queries per second (assuming the tables are indexed properly and the queries aren't trash)

There are mature open source backup solutions which don't require DB downtime (also available in most package managers)

It's trivial to tune a DB using .conf files (there are even scripts that autotune for you!!!)

Your VPS provider will allow you to configure encryption at rest, firewall rules, and whole disk snapshots as well

And neither MySQL or Postgres ever seem to go down, they're super reliable and stable

Plus you have very stable costs each month

wahnfrieden4• 6 months ago

Look into the capabilities of what I consider the leading edge of open source RDBMS managed solutions, Yugabyte: https://www.yugabyte.com

And tell me how easily you can achieve this "out of the box"

If you don't care about business continuity or high availability then everything gets easier

And neither MySQL or Postgres ever seem to go down, they're super reliable and stable

The box they're on goes down

senko3• 6 months ago

The box they're on goes down

So? Not everyone needs 99.999999% availability.

arielcostas• 6 months ago

It's not about it being hard, it's about delegating. Many companies are a bit less sensitive to pricing and would rather pay monthly for someone else to keep their database up, rather than spending engineering hours on setting up a database, tuning it, updating it, checking its backups, monitoring it and making it scale if needed.

Sure, any regular SME can just install Postgres or MySQL without even setting much up except with `mysql_secure_install`, a user with a password and an 'app' database. But you may end up with 10-20 database installs you need to back up, patch and so on every once in a while. And companies value that.

jama211• 6 months ago

Or at least they should. I’ve worked many places where thousands of dollars in engineering hours were wasted on something after they refused to use a service for a fraction of the cost. Some companies understand this but others don’t.

no_wizard2• 6 months ago

On the pricing bit, I have to say edge driven SQLite/ libsql driven solutions (this is a lot of them) can be a mixed bag.

Cloudflare, Fly.io litestream offerings and Turso are pretty reasonably priced, given the global coverage.

AWS with Aurora is more expensive for sure and isn’t edge located if I recall correctly, so you don’t get near instant propagation of changes on the edge

The bigger thing for me is how much control you have. So far with these edge database providers you don’t have a ton of say in how things are structured. To use them optimally, I have found it works best if you are doing database-per-tenant (or customer) scenarios or using it as a read / write cache that gets exfiltrated asynchronously.

And that is where I believe the real cost factors come into play is the flexibility

nicoburns• 6 months ago

I would have no concerns around reliability uptime running my own database.

I would have concerns around backups (ensuring that your backups are actually working, secure, and reliable seems like potentially time intensive ongoing work).

I also don't think I fully understand what is required in terms of security. Do I now have to keep track of CVEs, and work out what actions I need to in response to each one? You talk about firewall rules. I don't know what is required here either.

I'm sure it's not too hard to hire someone who does know how to do these things, but probably not for anything close to the $50/month or whatever it costs to run a hosted database.

trvz• 6 months ago

As for the CVEs: you just need to install from your OS’s package manager and run periodic updates. The communities take care of this very well.

pier257• 6 months ago

One instance maybe but multi regional?

lateforwork2• 6 months ago

Maybe I'm not the target market for this, but how hard is it REALLY to manage a RDBMS?

It is not. You can provision a free Postgres instance with a single click: https://neon.new/

jonathanstrange• 6 months ago

Yes, but there is nothing about pricing on this page. That doesn't make sense to me.

written-beyond• 6 months ago

Backups are a PITA I wanted to go exactly this route but even though I had VMs and compute I can't let any production data hit it without bullet proof backups.

I setup a cron job to store my backups to object storage but everything felt very fragile because if any detail in the chain was misconfigured I'd basically have a broken production database. I'd have to watch the database constantly or setup alerts and notifications.

If there is a ready to go OSS postgres with backups configured you can deploy I'd happily pay them for that.

viraptor• 6 months ago

Maybe I'm not the target market for this, but how hard is it REALLY to manage a RDBMS?

It depends:

- do you want multi region presence

- do you want snapshot backups

- do you want automated replication

- do you want transparent failover

- do you want load balancing of queries

- do you want online schema migrations with millisecond lock time

- do you want easy reverts in time

- do you want minor versions automatically managed

- do you want the auth integrated with a different existing system

- do you want...

There's a lot that hosted services with extra features can give you. You can do everything on the list yourself of course, but it will take time and unless you already have experience, every point can introduce some failure you're not aware of.

thatwasunusual• 6 months ago

There's a lot that hosted services with extra features can give you.

I totally agree with that, but in my experience 99% of "application developers" don't need all these features. Of those you listed, I only see "backups" as a requirement. Everything else is just - what I said - features for when your application is successful and you want something streamlined.

themafia• 6 months ago

Any Linux distro

What is the upgrade path?

How often do they release?

Do I have to worry about CVEs?

Who is doing network security?

Who is testing that security?

Where are my credentials stored?

Do I have a dashboard that tracks the hundreds of resources I'm responsible for including this new one?

Plus you have very stable costs each month

I'm sick and tired of managing linux boxes. It simply doesn't scale in any reasonable way.

cschmatzler• 6 months ago

fwiw, Bunny are the people that announced S3 compatibility for their object storage in Q2 2022 [1]

We can’t wait to have this available as a preview later in Q2 and truly make global storage a breeze, so keep an eye out!

then apologised for missing that in September 2023 [2]

We initially announced that we were working on S3 support for Bunny Storage all the way back in 2022. Today, as 2023 is slowly coming to an end, many of our customers continue to follow our blog, hoping for good news about the release.

changing the roadmap to early 2024 [2]

But we are working aggressively toward shipping S3 compatibility in early 2024.

That same post also has the beautiful "At bunny.net, we value transparency." quote. It's early 2026, and they're literally ignoring my support requests asking about what the roadmap is looking like for this now.

So, do not trust their product or leadership at all.

[1] https://bunny.net/blog/introducing-edge-storage-sftp-support... [2] https://bunny.net/blog/whats-happening-with-s3-compatibility...

fspoettel4• 6 months ago

Yeah I'm in the same boat. I was pretty excited to bring stuff over from Cloudflare but the missing S3 compat. and the communication around that was (and still is) a dealbreaker for me.

gsanderson• 6 months ago

I'd like it too. The new docs do refer to it e.g:

When S3 compatibility is enabled (currently in beta), the number of available replication points is reduced

I assume it's a private beta.

https://docs.bunny.net/storage/storage-tiers#s3-compatibilit...

dagss• 6 months ago

Why do you want to move from Cloudflare?

Asking because I was looking at both Cloudflare and Bunny literally this week...and I feel like I don't know anything about it. Googling for it, with "hackernews" as keyword to avoid all the blogspam, didn't bring up all that much.

(I ended up with Cloudflare and am sure that for my purposes it doesn't matter at all which I choose.)

nbevans• 6 months ago

Why would you move from Cloudflare to this shady company?

DonnyV• 6 months ago

You left out the part where they realized they couldn't ship S3 compatibility without rebuilding their storage service. So they have decided to rebuild their storage service. Not really a small project. So I can see how its taking longer. At least they were transparent about it.

cdrnsf• 6 months ago

I've stood up their CDN in front of a bucket at S3 and interact with the bucket for any actual operations.

notrab5• 6 months ago

Jamie from bunny.net here. Apologies for the delay after announcing S3. Building this required deeper changes to our storage foundation than initially anticipated, while ensuring that existing storage customers remained unaffected.

For clarity, S3 compatibility for Bunny Storage is now live in closed preview (since Jan 2026) with a select set of users.

We’ll soon introduce a sign-up page where users can register their interest, and in the next phase we’ll grant access to invited users.

7bit• 6 months ago

User critisised missing transparency and trust.

Company apologises for delay.

The comedic timing is insane.

kawsper3• 6 months ago

I've been struggling with Bunny the last couple of days.

Their log delivery api is delayed by over 3 days, despite them promising only "up to 5 minutes delay" in their docs: https://docs.bunny.net/cdn/logging

Why isn't it on the status page you might ask? Oh, that's because a delay is not "critical", but I fear I am losing loglines now, their retention is 3 days.

It's an interesting strategy for them, because it doesn't inspire confidence in me about their other offerings. When they can't reliably operate a log delivery API or be transparent about issues, it's hard to trust them with something as critical as a database.

davidcann• 6 months ago

I’m seeing log delays too the past couple of days… something like 14 hours, in my case.

kawsper3• 6 months ago

At 14:00 UTC, I was still seeing requests from 2026-02-01, and none from today, the order also seems random.

Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

joe-at-bunny2• 6 months ago

Hey, I’m Joe, Lead of Content Delivery & Security at bunny.net.

We’re currently working through a backlog of approximately 2.5M log files. I’ve spent the last day optimizing our backlog processing pipeline, which has significantly increased throughput.

Based on the current processing rate, we expect the backlog to be fully cleared within the next 12–18 hours (estimate), and real-time log delivery should progressively return closer to real-time as the backlog drains.

Apologies for the inconvenience this has caused. We’re also in the process of migrating away from our existing logging infrastructure to a ClickHouse-based system to significantly improve reliability and throughput and prevent this from happening again.

We’ve published a status page incident and will continue posting updates there as progress is made.

joe-at-bunny2• 6 months ago

As an additional update: we’ve deployed a change to our logging platform that separates backlog processing from the real-time ingestion queue. This should allow real-time log delivery to recover while the remaining backlog continues to process.

Havoc• 6 months ago

Will give this a spin. They’re one of the few cloud-y providers that has both prepayment and a rate limiter that doesn’t charge for rate limit exceeds (still blows my mind that providers charge for blocks).

badlibrarian• 6 months ago

Adding my voice to the chorus here: they've established a pattern of introducing new features and never really getting them past the 80% point. No qualms with the CDN; it's a sweet spot among providers. But their other offerings have been frustrating me for years now.

tpetry3• 6 months ago

Can you share some anecdotes?

ftchd• 6 months ago

we have 3 orange clouds now

postepowanieadm• 6 months ago

Managed sqlite?

kerblang• 6 months ago

Is this supposed to be a distributed DB that auto-synchronizes instances? Documentation doesn't seem to say anything about that.

If not, it seems like it would be quite a bit of work to implement the synchronization... and I don't understand why one would use it otherwise.

jorams• 6 months ago

This documentation page[1] seems pretty clear. One primary at a time, any number of read replicas that automatically proxy writes to the primary, when compute scales to zero the data is in object storage and a new primary can spin up elsewhere.

[1] https://docs.bunny.net/database/replication

turtlebits• 6 months ago

FYI, this is based on libSQL which has pretty poor driver support (Python still experimental).

deepsun• 6 months ago

Reminds me of how we got scarred by "parse.com" -- it was also a promising database, and our customer insisted on it, but after lengthy development and just before our project release turned out that they are shutting down and noone works on it anymore. Like literally their support said "uhm sorry folks, we're all hired by Facebook, no one is working on parse.com anymore".

jeromechoo• 6 months ago

parse.com was my last straw building on "as a service" startups because of this. DaaS is not even particularly good for hobby projects anymore given how easy it is to work with sqlite.

VoxPelli• 6 months ago

Main positive with bunny.net:

Its European rather than from USA so its less dependent on that orange guy in that white/golden house

horatius26• 6 months ago

I thought this would be a database of bunnies. My disappointment cannot be overstated.

zephen• 6 months ago

I came for the cute pictures, and stayed...

Nah, who am I kidding. I left.

Retr0id• 6 months ago

The "Wait, what does “SQLite-compatible” actually mean?" subheading didn't answer my question to be honest. They're using (forked) libSQL under the hood - ok, cool. But how do I interface with it?

They don't elaborate, but apparently libSQL has an HTTP API called "Hrana": https://github.com/tursodatabase/libsql/blob/main/docs/HRANA... - if that's what they're exposing, wouldn't it make more sense to call it libSQL-compatible or something?

fix4fun• 6 months ago

Yes, libSQL would fit better in that case. But all of it is marketing for better audience ;) (SQLite got x69 more searches than libSQL in Google).

m_nalikowski4• 6 months ago

Marek from bunny.net here. To connect to Bunny Database you can use one of the SDKs (TS, Go, Rust, and .NET) or the HTTP endpoint which is documented here: https://docs.bunny.net/database/connect/sql-api

breakingcups• 6 months ago

I wonder if they're stretching themselves too thin? Their CDN product is rock solid IME and so is their video streaming, but they've been adding a lot more "developer-platform" type products, seemingly trying to catch up to CF, and I'm not sure I'll ever trust it enough in terms of staying-power to ever commit to the vendor lock-in there. (I wouldn't with Cloudflare either, to be fair)

bobdvb• 6 months ago

There's very little margin in pure CDN products right now, so they're likely only making money on the value add products. Any money from CDNs is likely going back into maintenance, upgrading and growth.

tosti• 6 months ago

I can't take this seriously. You've got the backend of some networked application and now you want to offload the database to a SaaSS which has... "SQLite compatibility"?

SQLite is an embedded database. Every Android app for instance gets a db through sqlite for free. You can easily compile it yourself and embed it in pretty much anything that has a CPU.

So you'd like to offload this embeddable database that's nowhere near postgres or even maria, and then it even says:

Why care about database latency anyway?

Right. Because you can't even begin to think about introducing a network stack between your application and the database unless you can't be bothered at all about the latency.

I can't imagine myself a customer for this.

kevinfiol• 6 months ago

I'm surprised to see this is built on libSQL -- a while ago, I was told on the Turso Discord that libSQL was deprecated in favorite of the new `tursodatabase` packages. Is there a Bunny Database specific NPM package for the libSQL fork?

tomkarho• 6 months ago

I was hoping to find a database of bunnies. I was left sadly disappointed.

fuckinpuppers• 6 months ago

I used their cdn years ago and it was amazing. Did realtime image branding with signed urls and video delivery and it wasn’t even as spendy as I thought, it was like fractions of a penny when I thought it’d be a couple pennies… their api was easy to use.

S3 compatible storage was an exciting thing to look forward to. But some of their stuff off the shelf was cost effective and worked well

Bunny Database

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