pgEdge, Inc., a frontrunner in the realm of distributed Postgres, has unveiled a new survey that delves into how technology decision-makers navigate critical business processes during cloud service outages. This comprehensive study focuses on the high availability strategies employed by technology leaders, their tolerance for downtime, the utilization of failover tools, and their readiness to embrace distributed database architectures.
Frequent consequential outages pose significant risks, including data loss, missed business opportunities, subpar customer service, and potential damage to an organization’s reputation. Commissioned by pgEdge and executed in collaboration with The Foundry, the survey aims to shed light on how mid-to-senior IT leaders at SaaS companies and large enterprises leverage PostgreSQL for their mission-critical applications.
Insights into High Availability Strategies
The survey reveals the intricate challenges faced by technology leaders as they strive to balance cost-effectiveness with the necessity of high availability to safeguard their operations against cloud service or system outages. PostgreSQL emerges as a robust solution to meet these critical demands. Key findings from the survey include:
- 91% of organizations utilizing PostgreSQL require a maximum of 4 minutes of downtime per month (99.99% uptime) for their applications, with 24% aiming for less than 30 seconds. This statistic underscores PostgreSQL’s capability to support operations with stringent performance and reliability standards.
- While 21% have encountered an outage in the past year, a notable 82% expressed varying degrees of concern regarding potential cloud region failures, highlighting a widespread acknowledgment of the associated risks.
- A significant 79% of respondents are either evaluating (29%) or actively considering/piloting (50%) a distributed or purpose-built high availability PostgreSQL solution within the next year, indicating a strong demand and a promising market opportunity for pgEdge Distributed PostgreSQL.
Deployment Landscape of PostgreSQL
Demonstrating its versatility in both integrated and front-line applications, over half of the respondents (51%) reported using PostgreSQL within a hybrid database environment, while 35% rely on it as their primary database for customer-facing applications. The deployment stage is equally telling, with more than two-thirds of IT leaders actively running PostgreSQL in production; 37% utilize it for mission-critical applications, and 30% standardize it across most workloads, showcasing PostgreSQL’s maturity and strategic significance.
Organizations adopt various strategies to ensure high availability for their PostgreSQL workloads. Notably, 58% depend on read replicas and automated failover within a single region, while nearly half (47%) have already implemented PostgreSQL across multiple cloud regions with multi-master replication. Only 5% of respondents indicated a lack of a defined strategy.
Consequences of Downtime and the Advantages of PostgreSQL
Businesses that exceed their maximum downtime thresholds face a multitude of repercussions. Among those who experienced downtime beyond acceptable limits, 56% reported delays in business operations or workflows, while others noted damage to brand trust (40%), spikes in support requests (49%), and the need for emergency remediation (47%). These findings emphasize the critical need for resilient database architectures, with no respondents claiming to have faced “no impact.”
Conversely, organizations that implement high availability or distributed PostgreSQL solutions enjoy a range of benefits. The survey highlighted increased uptime and zero-downtime operations as the leading advantage at 53%, followed closely by cost savings compared to proprietary databases, which accounted for 36% of the responses.
Demographics of Survey Participants
The survey garnered insights from a diverse group of respondents, with 75% of the 212 IT decision-makers representing enterprises with over 500 employees identifying their roles within IT, Networking, or Security. Notably, 12% held C-level positions, including CIOs and Chief Data Scientists. A substantial 75% reported that their organizations are currently utilizing PostgreSQL in development or testing, underscoring the practical necessity for these solutions in managing business processes.
Respondent company sizes varied, with 25% falling within the 1,000 to 2,499 employee range and 12% employing over 10,000 individuals. This diversity illustrates a shared need for high availability strategies and failover tools across small, midsize, and large enterprises. The top three industries represented, accounting for 69% of all respondents, included financial services (banking, securities, and insurance), software and computing, and manufacturing.
“IT leaders are increasingly concerned with downtime for mission-critical applications and the risks of cloud region failure impacting their business,” remarked Phillip Merrick, Co-founder and CEO of pgEdge. “These survey results reinforce our understanding of the PostgreSQL landscape and pgEdge’s strategic position to address enterprise demand through our multi-master, distributed architecture.”
For those interested in a deeper dive, the full Postgres high availability survey can be accessed here.
About pgEdge
pgEdge is dedicated to simplifying the development and deployment of highly distributed database applications across global networks. Founded by industry veterans with extensive PostgreSQL expertise, pgEdge is headquartered in Northern Virginia. Its clientele includes notable enterprises such as Bertelsmann, Qube Research & Technologies (QRT), Jobot, the European Parliament, and various U.S. government agencies. Investors in pgEdge comprise Rally Ventures, Sands Capital Ventures, Grotech Ventures, Sand Hill East, Akamai Technology Inc., and QRT.
For further information, visit www.pgedge.com.
