KELLY STIRMAN: Hello, and welcome to "Helping You
Realize the Full Potential of PostgreSQL with Google Cloud."
my name is Kelly Stirman, and I'm
a Director of Product Management in the Databases group.
Later in this presentation, we'll hear from Phil and Tim
from Wayfair on how they're using Postgres on Google Cloud.
In this session, we're going to discuss
why so many of our customers are choosing Postgres to build
new operational systems and what we're
doing to help address some of their challenges.
The team from Wayfair will talk about their work with Postgres
on Google Cloud.
So let's get started and start by discussing
exactly what Postgres is and a brief overview of its history.
Postgres is a modern open-source relational database, originally
developed at UC Berkeley, and its first release was in 1996.
While commonly used to manage relational data,
it supports a more comprehensive set of data models,
like JSON, Key Value, XML, geospatial,
and many more capabilities through its powerful extension
model.
This rich data model support means
that Postgres is used in a wide range of database use cases.
Databases created with Postgres are
used in every conceivable type of application,
from the very simplest single-user database
app to demanding enterprise applications supporting
tens of thousands of users running thousands
of transactions a second.
It's found on the simplest single-board computers
to the largest Linux servers with hundreds
of cores and terabytes of memory,
managing petabytes of data.
So why have so many of our customers
adopted Postgres as a database of choice?
Well, organizations have started looking for alternatives
to the commercial database they have historically used.
They've done this as a means of reducing the perceived
punitive cost and the aggressive sales
practices that have somewhat soured their experiences.
But given the number of open-source databases
that are available, why should you consider Postgres?
Well, Postgres has a number of attributes that
make that decision simpler.
It provides a similar and, in some cases,
better set of functionality than the expensive closed-source
alternatives.
If you're looking for a database that supports parallel query,
partition tables, stored logic, replication, change data
capture, rich data models, and so on, all in a single product,
then look no further than Postgres.
On top of this impressive functionality,
Postgres has demonstrated itself in demanding customer
environments time and time again,
giving others the confidence to use it
in their own applications.
All this, and a friendly and engaging community
with a rich set of tools and utilities,
has made Postgres an easy choice for many of our customers.
But perhaps the most important aspect of Postgres
is its role as an open API.
While SQL is commonly considered the language of data,
and is indeed responsible for the ongoing success
of relational databases, each relational database
has its own implementation with functions and operators
that behave slightly differently,
and more substantial differences in programmatic APIs.
What Postgres has the potential to deliver
is a common SQL layer that is consistent,
regardless of the database engine that underpins it.
Postgres-- certainly, its SQL layer--
could lead to a standardization of databases in the same way
we've seen Linux change the enterprise operating system
world.
Cloud SQL for Postgres is part of Google Cloud's fully managed
database portfolio.
It provides fully managed, reliable database instances
with features that make databases
easy to set up, back up, restore,
and provide high availability.
It's the same version of Postgres
that you can download from the community website,
with the ability to choose between the version
of the database that suits your requirements.
Google takes care of the heavy lifting on your behalf,
patching and securing your databases
with very little downtime.
Cloud SQL aims to provide the best Postgres experience
anywhere in the cloud.
So given the many options you have
when deciding on where to run your Postgres databases,
why should you choose Google Cloud?
Well, Google understands the importance of the role
that open source plays in the enterprise
and is committed to provide the best experience for users
of Postgres.
We particularly understand the importance
that Postgres will play as a SQL standard
for databases in the future.
We offer a one-of-a-kind platform to run your Postgres
databases, using the same infrastructure that runs many
of the Google applications you use daily.
You get access to fast and scalable compute
and high-performance, low-latency networks
with a global reach.
Google continues to invest in its own dedicated
global network backbone and standing up
data centers around the world to ensure
you have the fastest and most secure access to your data.
We will continue to offer the best experience for developers,
whether you're building out your own VM-based applications
or building them on top of Kubernetes.
Google Cloud offers modern APIs and frameworks,
whether you plan to use Postgres to build
modern microservices or more traditional
monolithic applications.
We understand developers and are committed
to making your teams as productive as possible.
We've created integrations and management tools
to simplify how you make the most of your data.
And we provide rich and open APIs
to protect your application investments.
We've been hard at work adding important features
to Cloud SQL for Postgres.
Recently, we added support for logical replication and IAM
authentication, making Cloud SQL easier
to integrate with your core enterprise systems.
Cloud SQL for Postgres now supports over 140 flags
and 44 extensions.
We have tuned the operating systems on our Cloud SQL
instances for database workloads.
Google Cloud was the first to support
Postgres 13 in the cloud.
And in just a moment, we'll talk about Cloud SQL insights
and cost recommendations via Active Assist.
Our database migration service makes migration simple, safe,
and secure.
DMS is serverless, so there's nothing for you to provision
or manage.
DMS will do all that heavy lifting for you.
More than 85% of DMS migrations are underway
in less than an hour.
And a majority of these migrations
are coming from other clouds.
Observability is critical for managing your database
deployments.
Recently, we launched SQL Insights,
giving you best-in-class database observability using
open standards.
SQL Insights helps your developer teams
to understand performance issues,
whether you're building a monolithic app
or using microservices.
And now we provide cost recommendations
through Active Assist, helping you right-size your resources
and optimize your spend, potentially saving you
thousands of dollars a month.
So thus far, we've been talking about Cloud SQL for Postgres.
Now I'd like to spend a few minutes talking
about Cloud Spanner and some work we're doing with Postgres.
Cloud Spanner is the relational database
that banks, game studios, retailers and organizations,
and many other industries trust with their most
demanding workloads.
It's the same database that powers Google's
most recognizable products.
Spanner offers global consistency and five nines
of availability at almost any scale,
without painful sharding or re-architecture as you grow.
Spanner's new lower cost of entry
now makes realizing these benefits even easier.
You can start small and be assured that Spanner
will scale to meet your needs.
Even with Spanner and all of Google Cloud's unique benefits,
our customers want options.
Spanner isn't the only managed database service out there.
We want our customers to feel confident
that they'll be able to move their data
and applications elsewhere without a disruptive rewrite.
The PostgreSQL interface for Cloud Spanner
that we announced earlier today will provide the scalability
and reliability of Spanner that enterprises trust, along
with the familiarity and portability of Postgres
that developers love.
We're making it so you can bring your existing skills and tools
around Postgres to take advantage
of the unique capabilities Spanner
has to offer in terms of availability and scalability.
So, to sum it up, Postgres is becoming
the relational database of choice
for the enterprise for many good reasons.
We believe Google Cloud offers the best place
to run your Postgres databases.
And we're seeing a trend to make Postgres's SQL layer
act as an open API for applications and deployments.
Now, I'd like to hand things over to our friends
from Wayfair.
Tim and Phil, please take it away.
TIM QUINNEY: Thanks, Kelly.
Hello.
My name is Tim Quinney, and I lead
the product team for database platforms here at Wayfair.
I'm joined by Phil Portnoy, who's
our lead architect and engineer for database platform
development.
Wayfair is a platform that's solely
focused on the category of home across our six brands,
including our marquee Wayfair.com, and our specialty
brands of Perigold, AllModern, Joss & Main, Birch Lane,
as well as our Wayfair professional business.
We have more than 31 million active customers,
shopping a catalog of more than 20 million items
from a network of more than 16,000 global suppliers.
Powering the systems to make this all possible
is a team of over 3,000 software engineers and data scientists.
When considering the needs of our engineering community,
the use cases we support run the gamut
from integrating the suppliers to build our catalog
to marketing the products and powering
the customer-facing shopping experience online,
all the way to managing the delivery of orders
through our global logistics and operational systems.
To accomplish this, our database strategy
is focused on providing well-paved paths for our users
to quickly provision and deploy database solutions that
meet their scale, resiliency, and latency requirements,
all while providing a high-tier support and subject matter
expertise.
Core to this strategy is Postgres and Google's suite
of database products.
Whether it be single-region reads and writes
for similar applications running on Cloud
SQL or a globally distributed system running on Google Cloud
Spanner, we have found that Google's suite
of database offerings enable us to drive innovation.
To share more about why we're excited about Postgres
and the Google offering, I'll hand it over
to my colleague, Phil.
PHIL PORTNOY: Thanks, Tim.
For me, as an enterprise architect
for a fairly large engineering organization
of a couple of thousands of engineers and analysts,
technology matters.
PostgreSQL, being an open-source and free-to-use product,
is the type of technology that enables large enterprises
like Wayfair to have control over their own destiny
in the data space.
PostgreSQL is a proven technology.
Our developers can use it with any architecture and software
stack of their choice, without compromising
velocity and portability.
There is a massive amount of learning
materials, documentation, open-source guides.
And community support is available around the clock,
which truly puts developers first.
However, as most of you probably know,
considerations about databases don't end with developers.
Managing provisioning, orchestration, monitoring,
and maintenance of physical or virtual infrastructure
is a massive component of operating data stores.
Google Cloud Platform takes the infrastructure management
challenge out of the equation completely,
allowing us to focus effort and resources entirely
on product development.
Using open-source solutions helps
Wayfair to transform our business
in much more ways than one.
But there is one benefit that's hard to overlook,
and that benefit is cost.
In modern, fast-paced technological environments,
time to market is critical.
And PostgreSQL on Google's Cloud SQL
allows us to minimize the effort of preparing our products
and applications to serve production
workloads, while significantly reducing the overall cost
of the solution.
We've discovered that supporting similar workloads on Cloud SQL
and PostgreSQL is anywhere from four to eight times
cheaper than a comparable commercial database
engine provisioned on Compute Engine,
after accounting for licensing costs
and depending on the redundancy and distribution
level of the deployment, of course.
On top of that difference, with Cloud SQL
being a completely managed service,
there are additional cost savings
associated with dramatic reduction
in operating costs compared to deploying on premises
or in an unmanaged fashion.
This makes PostgreSQL a perfect, cost-effective solution
for the majority of online relational data storage
needs in Wayfair.
However, for some distributed use cases
where consistent, safe writes to the same data set
are happening from multiple locations,
spanning countries and sometimes continents,
a slightly different solution is required.
That's where Google Cloud Spanner comes in,
a truly distributed and truly consistent
solution for relational database workloads that
require distribution.
We're able to provision distributed data stores
within minutes and with almost zero operational effort
required from us.
Thanks to Google's TrueTime distributed clock,
Spanner is capable of providing the same consistency guarantees
as PostgreSQL at a minimal added latency cost,
switching from writing and storing data in a single data
center to persisting the same data
points in a globally distributed database.
And having the data available locally
for clients around the world requires
next to zero development time.
And with technologies like PostgreSQL Interface
for Spanner, software product journeys
can start with a local PostgreSQL database
and shift towards Spanner later in the lifecycle,
providing global availability in an effortless fashion.
Back to Tim.
TIM QUINNEY: Echoing what both Phil and Kelly shared,
the value proposition of Postgres
is highly resonant to us.
It's open source and cost efficient.
It has tremendous community support,
with low barriers of adoption for our users.
Google's investment in database products leveraging Postgres,
from Cloud SQL to the new Postgres interface in Spanner,
becomes increasingly compelling for us,
because these products are offered as managed services
and enable portability to follow the lifecycle
of an application.
I'm really excited about this concept of portability.
An application can start with a simple Cloud SQL instance.
Maybe it's a proof of concept on a Friday afternoon.
And before the team knows it, it's a runtime-critical system.
In due configuration, you can enable scale read.
If it grows to the occasion needing global distribution,
it can be migrated over to Spanner
without the need of a significant re-architecture.
This saves us from over provisioning infrastructure
from perpetual rewrites of applications
and from the significant overhead of managing
a sharded database environment.
For these reasons, teams such as our supply chain,
catalog engineering, marketing technology,
are already leveraging Postgres on Cloud SQL
for some of their systems.
Additionally, Spanner is quickly gaining traction,
their home services and customs platform
teams recently adopting.
As we look to the future, we're excited to see
what kind of performance and operational gains
can be achieved as we consider moving other systems to Cloud
SQL and Cloud Spanner.
One that comes to mind that's particularly exciting
for us is our user profile service, which is currently
on a sharded database environment
across many servers.
This is a prime candidate for migration to Spanner
and core to our customer shopping experience.
And now I'll hand it back to Kelly.
KELLY STIRMAN: Thanks, Phil and Tim, for that.
And thanks to all of you for joining us today.
We appreciate it.
Hope you have a great day.