Recent research indicates a growing concern among customers regarding the uptime reliability of PostgreSQL instances provided by hyperscalers, presenting an opportunity for smaller vendors to address this gap. A survey conducted by Foundry revealed that 82 percent of users of popular cloud services for PostgreSQL are apprehensive about potential cloud region failures, with 21 percent having experienced such failures in the past year.
In the first half of 2025, PostgreSQL emerged as the most significant climber in database popularity rankings, according to DB-Engines, gaining over 13 points to secure the fourth position overall, trailing only Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server. Notably, in 2023, PostgreSQL was recognized as the most favored database among developers, likely due to its accessibility through the leading cloud vendors.
Uptime Expectations
Foundry’s survey of 212 IT decision-makers across enterprises and SaaS businesses highlighted that a staggering 91 percent of organizations utilizing PostgreSQL expect no more than four minutes of downtime per month, translating to approximately 99.99 percent uptime. Furthermore, 24 percent of respondents aim for even more stringent requirements, targeting less than 30 seconds of downtime.
While Gartner’s Adam Ronthal acknowledged the lack of clarity regarding the reliability of PostgreSQL service level agreements (SLAs), he urged cloud service providers to monitor and document uptime metrics to dispel any lingering doubts and ascertain whether specific services are experiencing genuine issues.
Microsoft’s Azure Database for PostgreSQL offers a fully managed service with various deployment options, including single server, flexible server, and hyperscale configurations. Similarly, AWS and Google provide basic PostgreSQL services alongside more integrated solutions like Aurora and AlloyDB.
Exploring Alternatives
For users dissatisfied with the uptime performance of these hyperscaler services, a variety of PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL-compatible alternatives are available, featuring distributed architectures designed to enhance reliability. Notable examples include CockroachDB and YugabyteDB.
Recently, PlanetScale, known for its distributed MySQL service based on the Vitess database, launched a PostgreSQL service. CEO Sam Lambert emphasized that this new offering maintains compatibility with open-source PostgreSQL while leveraging a proprietary operator developed for their MySQL/Vitess service. “The operator is the piece of magic that kind of ensures PlanetScale has such strong uptime and reliability,” he explained.
Although the current service is not sharded, Lambert mentioned that a sharded version is in development, which will be “test equivalent” for PostgreSQL but not fully compatible. He noted that while YugabyteDB and CockroachDB are impressive distributed database solutions, they do not match the same level of PostgreSQL compatibility, with CockroachDB scoring around 40 percent and YugabyteDB achieving approximately 85 percent.
In contrast, Lambert asserted that PlanetScale’s PostgreSQL service is currently 100 percent compatible, with the forthcoming sharded service expected to reach around 99 percent compatibility.
Convex, an open-source reactive database provider for web developers, has begun transitioning from AWS Aurora to PlanetScale, citing significant performance improvements. In a blog post, the company remarked, “For years, we’ve operated Convex on top of AWS Aurora. The experience has been okay… But ‘okay’ isn’t where we want to stop.”
Another player in this space, pgEdge, is capitalizing on the concerns surrounding hyperscalers’ PostgreSQL service reliability. The company offers a multi-master distributed database built on open-source PostgreSQL, enabling users to maintain multiple master databases across various locations. CEO Phillip Merrick highlighted that their service provides “pretty extreme levels of high availability,” addressing latency issues for global applications.
Gartner’s Ronthal noted that distributed PostgreSQL services can mitigate the risks associated with the failure of a single cloud region. However, he pointed out that organizations requiring this level of fault tolerance represent a niche market, often trading off core features for built-in distributed processing and transactional consistency.
As users consider alternatives to hyperscalers’ PostgreSQL offerings, the key questions revolve around the compelling nature of price/performance ratios and the actual need for high availability. While some use cases demand it, others may find that traditional services like RDS serve as adequate stepping stones to more advanced solutions, whether tightly integrated with cloud infrastructure or offered by third-party distributed SQL database vendors.
In response to the survey findings and ongoing discussions about PostgreSQL service reliability, AWS stated that its PostgreSQL-compatible Amazon Aurora DSQL is designed for up to 99.999 percent availability, while Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL guarantees a 99.99 percent uptime SLA, complete with global replication and cross-region disaster recovery capabilities. Both Google and Microsoft were also approached for their insights on the issues raised.
