With Satya Nadella at the top Microsoft love for open source technology is soaring, months after making a huge acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion, the American technology giant is now acquiring a startup called Citus Data known for commercializing an open-source database software – PostgreSQL. While making the announcement, Microsoft did not disclose terms of the deal.
Citus is an open source extension to PostgreSQL that transforms PostgreSQL into a distributed database, increasing performance and scale for application developers. In a statement, the company said that because Citus is an extension to open source PostgreSQL, it gives enterprises the performance advantages of a horizontally scalable database. Citus is available as a fully-managed database as a service, as enterprise software, and as a free open source download.
The company said that since the launch of Microsoft’s fully managed community-based database service for PostgreSQL in March 2018, its adoption has surged. “Working together, we will accelerate the delivery of key, enterprise-ready features from Azure to PostgreSQL and enable critical PostgreSQL workloads to run on Azure with confidence,” Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure data at Microsoft, wrote in the blog post.
Currently, Citus Data’s website advertises a version of its database software that’s hosted on Amazon Web Services, reported CNBC, stating that Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether Microsoft will continue to offer the Citus Cloud offering on AWS.
The start-up Citus Data was founded in 2011 and had offices in San Francisco and Turkey, with 40 employees. Citus Data’s investors include Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, Data Collective and Khosla Ventures.
“As I reflect on our Citus Data journey, I am very proud of what our team has accomplished. We created Citus to transform PostgreSQL into a distributed database—giving developers game-changing performance improvements and delivering queries that are magnitudes faster than proprietary implementations of Postgres,” stated Umur Cubukcu, CEO and Co-Founder, Citus Data.
