Announcing Crunchy Bridge: A modern Postgres as a service

Craig Kerstiens

4 min read

Most database services in the cloud have not significantly evolved in the past 5 years. They tend to support the basics of read replicas and backups and then move on to other new shiny services, forgetting about a key pillar of your application: your PostgreSQL database. Today we're looking to change that with the launch of Crunchy Bridge. At Crunchy Data, we believe in the power of Postgres and want to bring all the greatness that is Postgres to all developers.

Crunchy Bridge delivers on the premise of a managed database service allowing you to focus on your application not your database, but we go several steps further.

For starters you can choose your cloud, and have the ability to replicate across clouds. Start on AWS, but have a business need to shift to Azure? Migration is as simple as clicking a button. Wish you could avoid AWS downtime by having a stand-by replica running in Azure? Crunchy Bridge can do that.

Then there is how much you can do with your database. Need to do some more advanced learning on your database but don't want to write PL/pgSQL? Here is PL/Python and PL/R for you... And for those of you who are curious our PL/Python setup comes with SciPy, NumPy, and Pandas already setup for you so you can start doing data science directly inside your Postgres database.

And then there are extensions. Postgres extensions are surprisingly powerful— allowing Postgres to add new data types, new functions, new functionality without waiting on a release of the Postgres core. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At the core of our service is a database you can trust, including:

  • Configured to be production-ready out of the box
  • Automatic backups
  • High availability
  • Point in time recovery to any time in last 7 days
  • Encryption in transit and at rest

As of today Crunchy Bridge is available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure. Crunchy Bridge is fully self-service, no annual contracts needed, if you don't want to talk to a sales person you don't have to. But if you have questions that we can help with we are available and I'm personally happy to help answer questions. Pricing is simple - you select the instance (memory/CPU) and the amount of storage. Database clusters start at $70 a month and scale up from there.

Crunchy Bridge is unique from other Postgres services by expanding beyond the basics. In addition to all the above features you'll also have:

  • Ability to replicate across clouds
  • Procedural languages including PL/Python and PL/R
  • Richer set of Postgres extensions than available anywhere else

When it comes to your data, trust and reliability is an important factor. With Crunchy Bridge you have a full team of Postgres experts behind you. From engineers that author and contribute to key Postgres tools (pgBackRest, pgMonitor, pg_partman) as well as core Postgres itself, you know that if you need support you’ll able to get it with Crunchy Data. You no longer have to worry if your support engineer can help you diagnose why the index is behaving oddly, because there is a chance we have the person that committed that index type around to help.

We’re excited to release Crunchy Bridge today. But, this is just the start. We have lots in store, more extensions, more features, and some interesting things that allow you to connect from on premises to the cloud and vice versa seamlessly. Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that if you're not in the cloud yet you still can leverage Crunchy expertise. For years we've been supporting large enterprises with their on premise deployments. Need HA? We've got Crunchy HA Postgres. Running inside Kubernetes? Give our operator a try. Whatever your Postgres needs are we're here to help.

Avatar for Craig Kerstiens

Written by

Craig Kerstiens

September 17, 2020 More by this author