About a year ago, I joined pgEdge because the mission of making applications faster and more reliable using distributed Postgres really clicked with me.

I had been an engineering leader at a SaaS company when our app went down an hour before a critical demo due to a cloud provider service outage. The engineering team had advocated investing in multi-region redundancy in the months prior, but I had to say “no”. Indications were that it was going to be more work than we could take on given our other commitments. This bothered me.

Building fast and reliable cloud applications is hard.

Today’s unveiling of pgEdge Cloud Developer Edition Preview represents a significant amount of our team’s work towards solving these problems, via our distributed, multi-region, multi-master (active-active) PostgreSQL distribution.

So, what is pgEdge Cloud, Developer Edition?

Developer Edition is our free usage tier of pgEdge Cloud, which focuses on getting all the goodness of a distributed PostgreSQL database into your hands as quickly and effortlessly as possible. pgEdge manages the infrastructure which means you can spin up a new globally distributed database in less than 90 seconds. We include a total of 3 vCPU and 12 GB total storage spread across the three nodes with a dedicated, multi-region private network for each database.

As of today, there is a one-click “Start Replication” button available in the pgEdge UI to set up replication of all table schemas and data within. Under the hood, this uses our Spock PostgreSQL extension to replicate changes made on any node to all other nodes in the cluster.

How does this compare to other versions of pgEdge Cloud?

In the Enterprise Edition of pgEdge Cloud, we help you provision your own clusters and their supporting infrastructure into your own cloud accounts, which we refer to as the Bring Your Own Account (or BYOA) model. This unlocks the full potential of pgEdge, with a range of supported configurations available.

In the near future we also intend to offer a Team Edition, which will be a nice middle ground that provides more customization, a pay-for-usage approach with no limit on the number of databases, with dedicated infrastructure in pgEdge owned cloud accounts.

Pure PostgreSQL

pgEdge is 100% pure Postgres which means it’s compatible with your existing Postgres tools and applications. Because pgEdge is built on top of Postgres as an extension and a couple small patches - rather than being a fork of Postgres - it means you can be guaranteed that all advancements made by the outstanding Postgres community will become available in pgEdge shortly after release.

pgEdge helps you adapt and accommodate existing applications when they were built using features like auto-incrementing primary keys which are a hindrance in distributed applications. We recently open-sourced our snowflake-sequences project as one example.

Curious about pgEdge? Give it a try!

There are a number of ways for you to quickly give pgEdge a try.

  • You can access our example Northwind Traders sample application at https://northwind.pgedge.com. This is running on a Developer Edition database and its dashboard gives you a peek at database queries, node selection, and activity from everyone else accessing the application. The source code is available on GitHub.

  • Go ahead and sign up for a free Developer Edition account here. It’s only one click to create a database after creating an account! Feel free to peruse our documentation if you want to learn more.

  • We also have a templated Cloudflare Worker that you can launch from GitHub if you are a Cloudflare fan.

  • And last, but not least, you can of course connect any PostgreSQL client to pgEdge, whether it’s PSQL or your own existing application.

Community, Questions, and Feedback

If you find something that you want to chat about or want to engage with pgEdge, come join the pgEdge Discord Server.

Please let us know what you think!