Citus Cloud now Generally Available

Written by Craig Kerstiens
July 13, 2016

Update in October 2022: The Citus managed database service is now available in the cloud as Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL. And as always, the Citus database is also available as open source: you can find the Citus repo on GitHub or download Citus here.

At Citus we want to enable you to build real-time applications across large amounts of data with ease. One part of that is Citus makes it simple for you to shard your data and use scale-out capabilities to leverage all your processing power. Another part is Citus Cloud: our managed, hosted offering of Citus running on AWS.

Today taking advantage of Citus becomes even easier with our Citus Cloud database going into general availability. You can read on to discover what’s included with Citus Cloud or sign-up to get started right away.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Citus database, Citus provides you the ability to:

  • Scale out real-time analytical and operational workloads across your full data set of up to billions of events per day.
  • Scale out your memory and processing by parallelizing your workload instead of being bottlenecked on a single machine.
  • Extends Postgres which means you get:
    • The power of SQL
    • Flexible data types like ranges and JSONB
    • Performant indexing with B-Tree, GIN indexes, and GiST
    • An ecosystem of extensions including PostGIS, Full-text search, HyperLogLog

You can read more about Citus or continue reading for more about Citus Cloud.

Citus Cloud

Simple provisioning and intuitive metrics

Citus Cloud makes it easier to get up and running with Citus. Once you create your account you have one-click provisioning to get a production-ready Citus cluster. Citus Cloud comes with an integrated dashboard to provide you with insights on everything you need to know, including:

  • High-level insights into how your system is performing
  • Metrics on your disk i/o and usage
  • One place to manage user access

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Production ready

Our team at Citus Cloud has years of experience managing millions of Postgres databases. We’ve taken that experience and ensured it’s not only easier than ever to scale your database, but also reliable. Our monitoring suite continuously monitors your database to ensure it’s healthy. If we discover any issues we begin a series of automated recovery processes to restore availability. In the event of any issues our engineers are on call so you don’t have to be.

Data safety

The only thing more important than keeping you up and running is keeping your customers’ data safe. All Citus Cloud clusters come with continuous protection enabled. We enable this by replicating the Postgres WAL (write-ahead log) to S3 to ensure that if your systems fail your data can still be recovered. If you elect for high availability, your database is streamed from your primary instance, across all nodes, to the standby. In the event of a failure we automatically fail you over keeping your IP address consistent, which allows your application to seamlessly reconnect.

Secure Role and User Management

Citus Cloud enables you to easily create additional users and roles that will be kept in sync across your distributed Citus database and all its nodes. You can use the advanced access control features built into PostgreSQL to give access to as many or as few database objects as you'd like:

  • Easily create a read-only user for your analytics tool
  • Give external contractors and third-party tools only the access they need
  • Safely support a microservice architecture by using specific permissions per app

You can also use our built-in Cloud dashboard to create new roles and rotate passwords easily:

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Available today

Citus Cloud is available today for you to get started. Pricing starts at $990 a month for a two distributed node cluster. Clusters can be configured in custom sizes, counts, and across many AWS regions. Sign-up today and provision your cluster.

Craig Kerstiens

Written by Craig Kerstiens

Former Head of Cloud at Citus Data. Ran product at Heroku Postgres. Countless conference talks on Postgres & Citus. Loves bbq and football.