Databases continue to be one of the most competitive areas of cloud computing, and Microsoft strengthened its database story Thursday with the acquisition of Citus Data.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Citus Data built an extension for the popular PostgreSQL open-source database that allows it to scale in line with the requirements of distributed cloud computing.
Microsoft offers PostgreSQL as a managed service on Azure, but will now be able to offer a version of PostgreSQL that scales more efficiently in response to demand. “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,” wrote Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure Data, in a blog post announcing the deal.
“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,” said Umur Cubukcu, co-founder and CEO of Citus, in his own blog post. The extension to the PostgreSQL database developed by Citus works as both a managed cloud service running on Amazon Web Services as well as on-premises servers, and it seems likely that an Azure version will arrive soon.
Citus becomes the latest open-source enterprise tech company to join Microsoft’s ranks over the past year, although the purchase price for this latest deal won’t be anywhere near the $7.5 billion Microsoft paid for GitHub. Citus has 35 employees, according to its team page, and was a graduate of the Bay Area’s Y Combinator startup incubator with backing from Khosla Ventures and Data Collective.
