In advance of Ignite, I spoke to Shireesh Thota, CVP Databases at Microsoft, about the new service. He described the rationale for a new PostgreSQL variant:
I think increasingly what we notice is that people either go into the bucket of, “I want to lift and shift my PostgreSQL that’s working in the community version on-premises, or maybe another cloud.” They want to move it to Azure. They want 100% Postgres. They want all extensions working. They just want something that really has the flexibility of performance and speed. Then Azure Database for PostgreSQL, the existing version is perfect. Somebody who wants to build an AI-native, cloud-native kind of a workload that may need a lot of storage, wants really fast latencies, significantly higher IOPS. Then you go to HorizonDB.
Certainly, the published performance data for Azure HorizonDB is impressive: Microsoft is claiming a three-times increase in throughput over the open source release when running transactional workloads. You can scale up to 3072 cores, with 128TB of storage and sub-millisecond commits. HorizonDB builds on Azure’s multiregion architecture with data replicated in multiple availability zones and automated maintenance and backups with minimal impact on operations. Such performance is needed for AI applications and for large-scale Kubernetes. As Thota notes, “These cloud-native workloads can really succeed on HorizonDB.”
Key to the performance boost are changes to the architecture of the database, separating compute and storage and allowing them to scale independently. If you need more compute, Horizon DB will give it to you. If you need more read replicas, it’ll provision them.