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What is Springtail?

Springtail is a cloud-native distributed database designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, enhancing read-heavy workloads without migration or application changes.

As a drop-in replacement for Amazon RDS read replicas, Springtail provides scalable compute on-demand, allowing you to instantly scale up when you need it and scale down to reduce costs during periods of lower demand.

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Benefits

Springtail provides significant advantages over traditional Postgres read replicas:

  • Instant scale-up: Springtail separates storage from compute, allowing additional replicas to spin up in seconds without requiring a new copy of the data.

  • Cost-efficiency: Only pay for what you use — reduce compute resources when they’re not needed, saving on peak provisioning costs.

  • Built-in optimization: Springtail’s proxy handles load balancing and connection pooling, so you don’t need to manage these services separately.

  • No downtime: Bring replicas online quickly without the downtime of snapshot creation or synchronization delays.

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Key features

Springtail enhances performance and efficiency through several key capabilities:

  • Scalable compute: Increase or decrease compute capacity as your workload changes, reducing unnecessary overhead.

  • Scalable storage: Independently scales storage from compute, allowing faster setup and efficient data access.

  • Optimized ingest pipeline: Reduces replication lag and ensures that reads receive the most up-to-date snapshot of the data.

  • Built-in proxy: Automatically manages load balancing and connection pooling, simplifying replica management.

  • Custom storage format: Optimizes storage for fast primary key access patterns, reducing latency on common database operations.

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Use cases

Springtail replicas are well-suited for traditional read replica workloads:

  • Nightly batch jobs: Efficiently process recurring large-scale operations without impacting your primary database.

  • ETL jobs: Seamlessly handle extract, transform, and load processes with scalable compute.

  • Read-heavy operations: Handle large queries, such as SaaS dashboards or table scans, without overloading your primary instance.

Any read-only transaction that might cause contention on your primary database is an ideal candidate for Springtail.

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Get started

Ready to get started? Follow these steps:

1

Start your instance

Use the Quickstart guide to set up your first Springtail database instance.

2

Manage your instance

Check out our How-to guides for tips on managing your Springtail instances.

3

Explore Springtail's architecture

Dive into the Core Concepts to understand the underlying architecture of Springtail.

Quickstart