>> Have you heard of Flexible Server
in Azure Database for Postgres?
Learn more in this episode of Data Exposed.
[MUSIC].
>> Hi, I'm Anna Hoffman and welcome
to this episode of Data Exposed.
Today, I'm joined by Sunil from the Postgres Team.
Sunil, thanks so much for joining us today.
>> Thanks Anna.
I'm really excited to be here.
>> Yeah, we're excited to have you here.
Before we get into the topic for today,
can you tell us a little bit more about what you do?
>> Sure. I lead the Program Manager Team for Postgres in Azure.
I've been with Microsoft for over 20 years.
I'm really excited to be part of this team.
>> Awesome, very cool team.
Today we want to talk about Flexible Server,
and this isn't something I really know anything about.
I wanted to start by just asking you,
what is Flexible Server for Azure database for Postgres?
>> Anna, Flexible Server is the next generation
and Azure database for Postgres.
It is based on Linux operating system.
The reason this is actually very important,
is that Postgres engine was architected on Linux.
You can say that Linux is it's natural habitat,
and the Flexible Server is our offering on Linux operating system.
>> Cool. Can you tell me a little bit more
about what makes Flexible Server so exciting?
>> Actually, we are very excited about Flexible Server.
One thing I want to say a little bit of the background.
The Microsoft released the first Azure database on Postgres,
and that we call a Single Server.
That was released more than two years ago.
I'm going to use that term for simplicity.
Single Server has been
very successful offering for Flexible Server.
We have thousands of customers
who have been running their workload
starting from small businesses,
mom-and-pop shops, to enterprises.
Its a whole range of applications
that leverage Postgres have been
running very successfully in Single Server.
Over the past two years we have worked with many customers,
understood their workloads,
understood their challenges
that they have with the Single Server.
What we have with the Flexible Server is
all those learnings that we got with our customer interactions,
and folded into the Flexible Server so that
we can have customers coming to Flexible Server
with a much easier onboarding and running of their workload.
Think about this, this is like all the learnings we have
compressed into Flexible Server
and that's Flexible Server on Linux operating system.
>> Awesome, great.
For this new Flexible Server,
maybe customers want to start using it for their new applications.
What about customers that are using Single Server today?
>> The customers who are using Single Server,
they can continue to use Single Server.
But we recommend them to try out Flexible Server
and take advantage of it.
To help customers migrate from Single Server to Flexible Server,
we have been working on simplifying that migration.
We have a migration tool that can be used,
pretty much mostly automated to take a database
from Single Server onto Flexible Server.
If the requirements are met,
it can be done with a minimal downtime using Postgres replication.
>> Awesome, great. That seems like a
pretty smooth, hopefully migration.
For new customers,
it's pretty easy you just recommend.
Would you recommend everyone start with Flexible Server now moving
forward or still think about Single Server over Flexible Server.
>> We highly recommend any customer who is thinking about creating
a new application or onboarding Postgres server,
we recommend them to just start with Flexible Server.
This is our future and this is what we want to recommend.
>> Awesome, great. That's great to know Sunil,
so thanks for letting us know.
Is there anything else or any tips, tricks,
advice you have for customers
either getting started with Flexible Server
or thinking about moving to Flexible Server?
>> Flexible Server actually offers many of the exciting features,
and maybe Anna allow me to go through some of those.
>> Sure, please.
>> The Flexible Server,
one of the things that we learned through Single Server
was that it needs to be developer-friendly.
When you come to use Flexible Server,
you can provision it with a single command with very few clicks.
We want to take the complexity out of provisioning
and operating your Postgres database completely,
so that you can focus on your application.
That is first aspect.
A lot of our developers are very price-conscious.
They are trying to play with Flexible Server within their budgets.
We offer, as a introductory offer,
a free 12 month offer that you can Postgres,
Flexible Server that you can provision
and play with it with no cost implication.
We're hoping with that you will give it a shout and give us a try
and run your application on Flexible Server.
Other thing that we have done is,
we have offer a SKU,
which we call burstable SKU.
This is our lowest price SKU
that you can provision a Postgres server for $28.
Once your free offer expires,
you can switch to burstable,
and it is $28 a month, very low price.
The good thing about it is,
when you develop your application on burstable and if you want to
go to higher SKU just like general purpose or memory optimize,
you can just simply upgrade to those SKUs
without worrying about any downtime.
You can just go up there.
Third thing to reduce the cost,
we offer a capability where you can stop your server.
For example, if you would look up a developer.
Developers are working, say, to 5:00.
Once they are done developing
and they want to sign up for the day,
they can stop the server.
When you stop the server,
you're not paying for the compute,
you're only paying for the storage that you are using,
and next morning when you come,
you can start the server again.
Free offer, burstable, and start and stop.
You can lower the cost of using Flexible Server
for a development in a very significant way.
Also, one of the things we are trying to do is
to onboard newer versions of Postgres servers
as they are released by the community.
Our target is to release the new versions of
Postgres on Flexible Server
within three months of the community release, so that's that.
Other thing, Anna,
we do is we are offering with the Flexible Server
a much better out-of-the-box performance.
Think of this right, when customers use Postgres,
a lot of customers are hosting the Postgres themselves.
They can create Postgres server on their on-premise machine,
or if they want, they can create on a VM.
They have a good control on
what configuration parameters they can set
and how they connect to the Postgres server.
Our goal with the Flexible Server is,
when you want to move your application
or Postgres server from IS or the VM onto Flexible Server,
our target is to give you
very comparable performance of what you were getting on the VM.
The beauty of this one is then,
when you move your application to Flexible Server,
you don't have to worry about managing the Postgres server,
because you have very comparable performance and we
take the complexity of managing your servers automatically.
There's that.
Second thing that we have done is,
we have given an option to co-locate.
In fact, that's what we recommend.
You can co-locate your application on the same data center,
if you will, as Postgres server.
This is important because within the data center in Azure terms,
that is called Availability Zones,
so you can provision your application,
your Flexible Server,
and your data into the same Availability Zone.
What that gives you is a very low latency
under one millisecond of round-trip,
so if you have applications that have such requirements,
Flexible Server is your target.
The third thing that we have done to simplify the performances,
we provide built-in connection pooler,
PgBouncer, in Flexible Server,
so your application can continue
to connect to the Flexible Server,
and behind the scene in the service,
we will do the connection pooling,
which is very important for short running connections.
That's that.
Then, finally, we provide a much richer
set of server parameters for configurability.
For example, max connections,
you can configure max connections.
You can configure your shared buffer memory.
Those capabilities were not available in Single Server,
and we heard from a lot of customers,
"Hey, we want those configuration parameters."
It's a much richer set.
As a developer, you have a very low-cost offering,
you have a much better out-of-box performance,
and then the third thing that comes is
how reliable this server is.
With the Linux architecture running Flexible Server on Linux,
the architecture has become very simple for us.
There are very few moving parts,
so it is very reliable, and we have many customers
running their production workloads on Flexible Server.
T hat's that.
Then, we offer for high availability,
the zone resilient capability.
What it means is that,
you can have a standby
that is running in a different Availability Zone,
which is synchronous replication.
What it means is if for some reason
the Availability Zone of your primary node goes down,
you can fill over automatically
without any changes to the application,
to the standby, which will now become the new primary.
So you have the much higher availability using zone resiliency.
The third thing that we have heard from customers, again,
experience from Single Server was, "Hey,
I know there has to be maintenance
done periodically on the servers."
and previously in Single Server,
the customer had no control on when that maintenance is done,
and each business is very different.
Anna, what we provided is now a capability
where customers can choose, "Hey,
I want to do this maintenance of my Postgres server,
Flexible Server, on Sunday night at 09:00 PM."
Then what happens is,
we can cater to your business requirements
to provide that maintenance.
If you look from the reliability and availability perspective,
much simplified architecture, zone resilient HA,
and maintenance window that customer chooses,
so then the developer-friendly,
out-of-box performance, and high availability.
The final thing that comes,
what about the security?
Because people are concerned, "Hey,
if I'm going to host my workload in the Cloud,
it has to be very secure."
So we provide both in-transit and at-data-rest encryption.
Your data when it comes from your client machine
onto Flexible Server, it is encrypted.
When it is stored inside Azure Storage, it is encrypted.
we provide that, and we provide also the private access
through injecting your Postgres servers in your own VNet,
so you have full control on whether your Postgres Flexible Server
is it visible just within your organization,
which is what you want to do,
or it is a public API?
We provide those things.
The third thing which is also
important from a security perspective,
we are hosting Flexible Server and its own VMs.
Each customer is running their Flexible Server
and its own VM completely isolated
from other customers who are running
their separate Flexible Server in their own VMs.
These are some of the things we have done for security.
We do believe, with the developer friendliness,
out-of-box performance, high availability, and security,
you will choose Flexible Server as your platform of choice
when you come to Azure Database for Postgres.
>> Awesome, thanks so much Sunil.
I love that explanation and now as you've explained it to me,
it makes so much sense why you're saying,
"Flexible Server is our future and we recommend
if you're creating a new database you move towards Flexible Server,
and even consider migrating from Single Server to Flexible Server."
Sunil, I just wanted to thank you so much for coming on the show.
This has been really informative for myself
as well as I'm sure for our viewers.
For our viewers, we're going to put some links in the description
for you to go learn more about Flexible Server.
If you like this video, go ahead and give it a like,
subscribe to our channel, and leave us a comment
to let us know what you think about Flexible Server.
Again, thanks so much Sunil,
and we hope to see you next time on Data Exposed.
>> Yeah. Anna, thank you so much,
and please free to contact me or Postgres team
for any questions if you want to try Flexible Server.
>> Great. Thank you.
>> Thank you.
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