POSETTE CFP is closed. Thanks to all submitters. Remember to save the date for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024 📌
POSETTE CFP is closed. Thanks to all submitters. Remember to save the date for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024 📌
SAN FRANCISCO, CA—(Marketwired - November 16, 2017) - Citus Data, the go-to platform for scaling out Postgres databases, has launched new features for its Citus Cloud product that have never before been available on distributed databases, making it easier than ever for fast-growing SaaS businesses to scale out without having to re-architect their application. The release makes significant strides in closing the gap that until recently pushed many developers to consider NoSQL as one of the few feasible options for scaling out.
Even early on in learning to program we take advantage of comments to explain and describe Citus Cloud is the only cloud database that can scale out Postgres across multiple nodes, increasing an application’s ability to perform in the face of extreme growth. The ability to scale out Postgres in the cloud is a much-needed choice for developers who in the past had only three cost-prohibitive ways to scale: proprietary vertically scaled databases; rewriting their applications to use NoSQL and trading off functionality as a result; or diverting in-house developers away from their own application’s features to manually shard at the application layer, a project that can span from many months to years. Until now, all three of these costly options have posed a significant scaling challenge to fast-growing companies, resulting in opportunity cost and falling behind against competitors.
“Our customers don’t want to give up the power of SQL with a move to NoSQL in order to scale their business. And since Postgres is their SQL database of choice, our greatest value is giving them a way to scale out Postgres when they reach that tipping point,” said Umur Cubukcu, CEO at Citus Data. “This release of Citus Cloud makes it easier than ever for customers to migrate their applications from single-node Postgres to Citus. And with developer-friendly features like the zero-downtime shard rebalancer, followers, and point-in-time recovery, we’ve made the choice to go with our Citus Cloud database easier than ever, too.”
The Citus Cloud database is being adopted at a rapid clip with a 650 percent year-over-year increase in revenue, due in large part to the growth of SaaS businesses and the popularity of Postgres as the ideal database for modern SaaS companies. There are more than 12 billion transactions per day conducted in Citus Cloud, not counting the many Citus open source and Citus on-prem enterprise deployments.
The inability to scale out SQL databases has been a longstanding pain point, and a big challenge for fast-growing SaaS businesses. Sharding at the application layer often requires multiple person-years to re-architect the application-and the real pain is the opportunity cost: think of all the features the application developers could have created during that time? And while NoSQL databases can scale out, NoSQL forces developers to give up powerful database features like consistency, joins, and constraints.
Citus Cloud’s suite of new features close the gap with NoSQL and are all about empowering developers: from migration tools like Citus Warp, to the zero-downtime shard rebalancer, to being the first to offer fork and followers features in a distributed database. Citus has done years worth of heavy lifting to make it possible to scale out Postgres in the cloud-and to make scaling out as simple as dragging a slider. New Citus Cloud features include:
Citus Warp. Developers can now stream ongoing transactions from single-node Postgres databases into the Citus Cloud database as they prepare to migrate and ‘warp’ their application from RDS to Citus, reducing cutover time to minutes from hours or days, even for terabytes of data.
“It’s difficult to express how great the Citus Warp migration utility is without slamming all the other data migration solutions in the world. But I’ll try: Citus Warp is one of the most seamless database migration tools I’ve ever used, and I’ve used some pretty expensive products from Oracle and EMC/Dell,” said Scott Mitchell, CTO at SalesLoft. “With Citus Warp, our cutover was smooth, with almost zero downtime. Now that we’re running on Citus Cloud, our application gets the performance benefits of a Postgres database that can scale out.”
Zero-downtime Shard Rebalancer. Citus Cloud’s new zero-downtime shard rebalancer closes the gap with NoSQL scalability features-and enables cloud database customers to elastically scale out memory, compute, and storage as they add nodes to their distributed database cluster, without any downtime.
Point-in-Time Recovery. Another first for distributed databases. With Citus Cloud’s point-in-time recovery, developers can roll back their distributed cloud database to any point in the last ten days to recover lost data, whether for internal data recovery or to help a customer who has inadvertently purged data.
“We were able to migrate relatively easily to run on top of Citus, even though our app had zero knowledge of sharding beforehand,” said Kelly Cheng, CTO of ProsperWorks. “And now that we’re using Citus Cloud, we don’t have to worry about how to manage our growth-not even 10X growth. Plus there are new features coming online with Citus Cloud that are awesome, features like fork and point-in-time recovery. Sometimes we need to go back and look at past versions of our production database to see what happened, or to help a customer of ours to restore data. Point-in-time enables us to do just that.”
Followers. Enable developers and analysts to run real-time, complex queries without putting any query load on the production database. With Citus Cloud, a follower is a read-only replicated copy of the database that is kept up-to-date with streaming transactions.
Fork. Citus Cloud is the first to give developers the ability to fork a distributed production database. With Citus, they can instantly fork a full copy of their database for staging, experimentation, or running complex queries-without worrying about negatively impacting the production database with experimentation.
Integration with Rails and Django. Citus Cloud meets developers where they are and has enabled easy migration for Ruby on Rails and Django applications with multi-tenant libraries for both frameworks.
Distributed Transactions. The Citus team has made it easier than ever for developers to migrate applications onto Citus with new support for distributed transactions. No longer do developers have to trade off ACID properties in a distributed database as they do with NoSQL. Citus provides full SQL transactions in a distributed database, in the cloud.
The Citus Cloud team has also continued to add to their suite of security features, introducing IP whitelisting, two-factor authentication, encryption at rest and in transit, network perimeter controls, and certificate verification.
“Citus makes things possible for us that would have been nightmarish in a NoSQL world,” said Jarred Nicholls, Chief Software Architect at IronNet Cybersecurity. “Moving to Citus has improved the reliability and performance of our database, and the fact that it’s not a black box and all the Citus metadata is open and hackable gives us a lot of flexibility. The Postgres expertise in the Citus team is also a big attraction and has made Citus a one-stop shop for us.”
Read more about Citus Data’s vision for Citus Cloud and all the nitty gritty details of this Citus Cloud update: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/11/16/citus-cloud-2-postgres-and-scale-without-compromise/