Heroku Postgres is a cloud database service and the largest provider of PostgreSQL as a service anywhere. We operate more than 1,000,000 PostgreSQL databases with a team of about 10 people. We may be the most efficient DBAs in history, with approximately 100,000 databases per person on our team! This talk will introduce the opportunity and challenges of building and operating a cloud database service, as well as discussing the strategies we use to build, operate, and scale this product and team for the last six years now. We will include details about

• a brief introduction to the service to provide context
• strategies to design and build such a data service
• operational war stories like how to recover from losing thousands of servers at once,
• common challenges users have with Postgres
• and a basic overview of the technical architecture

This is a complementary talk to Will Leinweber's talk, which will go into much more depth on the architecture of the software we have written.