pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL offers low latency and ultra-high availability for applications running at or near the network edge and across cloud regions
pgEdge, Inc. emerged from stealth and launched the first fully distributed database optimised for the network edge based on the standard and popular open-source PostgreSQL database. Concurrently the company also announced $9M in a seed financing round led by Sands Capital Ventures and Grotech Ventures.
For application developers and database architects looking to deploy low latency and/or high availability applications that need to be globally distributed, pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL is a multi-active (multi-master) distributed database system. For the first time presentation, compute functions and the world’s most popular open-source relational database can all be deployed at or close to the network edge, providing reduced data latency, better customer experiences, ultra-high availability, and a way to address data residency requirements without application code changes.
For current users of PostgreSQL who need a simpler approach to high availability, pgEdge provides great flexibility to manage application workloads and architect for rapid failover, given every node can take both read and write traffic. While designed to work in edge deployments across many nodes, pgEdge also functions well running across just a few cloud regions to provide applications with lower latency, automated failover support and disaster recovery capabilities.
“We founded pgEdge to provide an open Postgres-based distributed database platform to meet the demands of today’s modern applications: always on, always global, and super responsive,” said Phillip Merrick, co-founder and CEO of pgEdge, Inc.
pgEdge Use Cases and Benefits
E-commerce companies, SaaS companies and large enterprises can apply pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL to solve some of their toughest technology challenges. In particular:
- E-commerce and SaaS companies can reduce long webpage load times and improve customer experiences by placing database copies closer to their users.
- Major enterprises can save money by reducing their dependency on expensive proprietary databases while retaining ultra-high availability and distributed capabilities.
- Companies struggling to meet international data residency requirements can use pgEdge’s data residency features to “geo-shard” their database and keep locally generated data local while sharing other data globally. This also supports geographic scaleout where a monolithic database architecture is hitting up against performance limits.
“For leading e-commerce companies like ours, pgEdge is a game changer and will give us fast page loads and a smooth customer experience regardless of where our customer is located,” said David Ting, CTO of Zenni Optical. “Additionally, pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL can give our engineers a solid foundation for building a new generation of e-commerce applications by allowing the developers to develop on native Postgres, yet have the advantages of a modern distributed data store.”
“We’ve been testing pgEdge for several months now as an early customer. We are excited by its ability to reduce page load times between the US and Europe, significantly improving the user experience for our international staff and customers,” said Bill Mitchell, CTO of PublicRelay, a SaaS media analytics company serving Fortune 500 customers.
pgEdge Product Offerings and Availability
The pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL database is available via:
- pgEdge Cloud: a fully managed distributed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that includes an intuitive user interface making it easy to securely configure, provision and monitor a cluster of pgEdge databases running in any of over 100 zones across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud (2H 2023).
- pgEdge Platform: downloadable software for self-hosting either on-premises or in the cloud for organisations that need or prefer to self-host their database software. It can be deployed on-premises or in customer-managed cloud accounts on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud; it is also suitable for developers who want to evaluate the capabilities of pgEdge.
pgEdge Architecture and Source Code Availability
The multi-active (multi-master) architecture of pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL allows read and write operations to take place at any database node on the network, and a configurable conflict resolution and avoidance algorithm prevent or resolves any write conflicts between nodes. Nodes in a pgEdge cluster can span multiple cloud regions and data centres, affording very high levels of resiliency, availability and performance. Each pgEdge node runs standard PostgreSQL v14 or v15, including the “Spock” extension for multi-active asynchronous logical replication developed by pgEdge. The source code for Spock and associated tooling is available on GitHub and covered by the pgEdge Community License.
pgEdge, Inc. co-founder and CTO Denis Lussier explained, “We wanted to build on previous Postgres replication solutions but do so in an open and non-proprietary way, and that’s what we are doing with Spock.”
pgEdge is designed to work well with modern web application developers built on the JAMStack architecture. pgEdge integrates with edge development platforms from companies such as Cloudflare, Fastly, Netlify, Akamai and Vercel. These platforms make it easy for developers to move presentations and compute close to users at the network edge. pgEdge now puts databases at or near the edge for low latency and high availability.
