Citus Blog

Relational databases have been a mainstay in applications for decades now. And with their dominance has come a rich set of tools: you have tools to help with monitoring, to gain insight into performance, and to operate the database in safe ways.

The knock against relational databases has long been: what happens when you need to scale? At that point, you usually have to make difficult trade-offs, like having to trade off relational semantics in order to get a database that scales out (think: NoSQL.) Or having to find a way to reduce the amount of data you need to retain, in order to continue to skate by with a single-node relational database. Or having to trade off as much as a year’s worth of application features in order to divert an engineering team away from your core business, to instead spend their time sharding the application. Bottom line: the database trade-offs to get scale can be painful.

Today I’m excited to announce Citus Cloud 2, the newest version of our cloud database. We launched the first release of Citus Cloud 18 months ago as a fully-managed database as a service that enables you to keep right on scaling your relational database. If you’re unfamiliar, Citus is an extension to Postgres that transforms your Postgres database into a distributed system under the covers, while appearing to your application as a single-node database. With Citus, you don’t need to teach your application all about distributed systems to continue scaling. We make Citus available as open source, as on-prem enterprise software, and as a fully-managed database as a service, Citus Cloud. And with Citus Cloud, you have all of your management/backups/etc. taken care of for you.

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