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Comment by benesch

9 hours ago

For local dev + testing, we recommend just hitting the production turbopuffer service directly, but with a separate test org/API key: https://turbopuffer.com/docs/testing

Works well for the vast majority of our customers (although we get the very occasional complaint about wanting a dev environment that works offline). The dataset sizes for local dev are usually so small that the cost rounds to free.

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benesch

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lambda  6 hours ago

> although we get the very occasional complaint about wanting a dev environment that works offline

It's only occasional because the people who care about dev environments that work offline are most likely to just skip you and move on.

For actual developer experience, as well as a number of use cases like customers with security and privacy concerns, being able to host locally is essential.

Fair enough if you don't care about those segments of the market, but don't confuse a small number of people asking about it with a small number of people wanting it.

  • nik9000  5 hours ago

    As someone who works for a competitor, they are probably right holding off on that segment for a while. Supporting both cloud and local deployments is somewhere between 20% harder and 300% harder depending on the day.

    I'm watching them with excitement. We all learn from each other. There's so much to do.

  • benesch  5 hours ago

    Yep, we're well aware of the selection bias effects in product feedback. As we grow we're thinking about how to make our product more accessible to small orgs / hobby projects. Introducing a local dev environment may be part of that.

    Note that we already have a in-your-own-VPC offering for large orgs with strict security/privacy/regulatory controls.

  • sa-code  5 hours ago

    Can confirm. With a setup that works offline, one can

    - start small on a laptop. Going through procurement at companies is a pain

    - test things in CI reliably. Outages don’t break builds

    - transition from laptop scale to web scale easily with the same API with just a different backend

    Otherwise it’s really hard to justify not using S3 vectors here

    The current dev experience is to start with faiss for PoCs, move to pgvector and then something heavy duty like one of the Lucene wrappers.

enigmo  7 hours ago

having a local simulator (DynamoDB, Spanner, others) helps me a lot for offline/local development and CI. when a vendor doesn't off this I have often end up mocking it out (one way or another) and have to wait for integration or e2e tests for feedback that could have been pushed further to the left.

in many CI environments unit tests don't have network access, it's not purely a price consideration.

(not a turbopuffer customer but I have been looking at it)

  • benesch  6 hours ago

    > in many CI environments unit tests don't have network access, it's not purely a price consideration.

    I've never seen a hard block on network access (how do you install packages/pull images?) but I am sympathetic to wanting to enforce that unit tests run quickly by minimizing/eliminating RTT to networked services.

    We've considered the possibility of a local simulator before. Let me know if it winds up being a blocker for your use case.

sa-code  5 hours ago

I should have clarified, by local dev and testing I did in fact mean offline usage.

Without that it’s unfortunately a non starter