Interview with Aiven
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of the PGConf.EU 2023 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
- What makes your company a great place to work?
-
Aiven enables customers to focus on building their products without the need to care about their infrastructure, like PostgreSQL. And we can do this because our approach is always upstream first. Instead of spending time and efforts developing our own version of PostgreSQL we dedicate our efforts to contribute features, bug fixes, and tooling to the upstream project. Aiven doesn't just improve their customers' lives, it improves the ecosystems they are part of.
A team photo from our 2023 off-site - How does PostgreSQL help you bring value to your customers?
Our customers chose PostgreSQL because of its stability and resiliency. Qualities we recognize and underline. We provide a “one-click” PostgreSQL to our customers, so they can focus on their business while we take care that they’ll always have the best database up and running.
- Which of your company's contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference) are you most proud of?
-
PGHoard and PGTracer.
PGHoard is our attempt to make PostgreSQL backups “cloud native”. This is one of our oldest open source projects and it has seen plenty of usage and activity from the community.
PGTracer is a newer project in the space. Keeping up with our attempts to make PostgreSQL more cloud friendly we saw the need to improve traceability within PostgreSQL itself. This is the reason why we created this project.
- In which areas do you expect PostgreSQL to grow most and how does your company contribute to and benefit from that growth?
PostgreSQL as it is is a great product already, but if we would need to choose an area to improve we might pick observability and traceability.
We envision PostgreSQL to become a fully cloud native database, to help achieve this, we released PGTracer for example and we’ll keep improving it and looking for ways for end-users to understand what’s going on with, and in, their PostgreSQL instances.
- Why does your company attend PostgreSQL Conference Europe?
-
PostgreSQL holds a special place in our hearts. Aiven started as just four PostgreSQL developers intimately aware of how the database solves a broad spectrum of problems for a great diversity of businesses. While Aiven has added more services (and deployment methods, and integrations, and…) to the mix, PostgreSQL is what got us started. It’s part of our DNA.
Aiven’s founders: Hannu Valtonen, Oskari Saarenmaa, Heikki Nousiainen, and Mika Eloranta In previous years Aiveners spoke at and attended PGConfs. Like last year, when Francesco Tisiot took to the stage to talk about (among other things) the Metadata Parser open source project. This year Francesco has a session in the Sponsor track, and Matt Cornillon, Senior Solutions Architect, will talk about “How I found my Pokémon cards thanks to Postgres: an AI journey”.
Francesco Tisiot, Staff Developer Advocate, at PGConf EU 2022 Also: have you seen Prague in December? It’s like a fairy land, what better place to be?