Interview with Microsoft
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not neccessarily represent those of the PGConf.EU 2024 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
- In which areas do you expect PostgreSQL to grow most and how does your company contribute to and benefit from that growth?
-
PostgreSQL will continue to shine with its extensibility, proving that single purpose storage systems have a very flexible competitor. The recent popularity of Postgres as a vector storage engine is great proof of that, and we foresee that more extensions will arrive in the near future to facilitate building and fine-tuning generative AI applications natively on and around the database. We leverage this extensibility by making pgvector available on our services, contributing to its performance improvements and reliability, and complementing it with integrated Azure AI services through our first-party extension, azure_ai. Since we deploy PostgreSQL at scale, we continue to invest in upstream performance improvements, reliability, and visibility features (like with the recent pg_stat_io view). Many of us originate from the PostgreSQL community, we see it as an important part of overall PostgreSQL maturity hence we also strive to sponsor events and conferences organized by the community, where we give (often earned) talks to contribute our own learnings!
- What is your PostgreSQL centered product and what makes it unique?
-
Our PostgreSQL centered product is Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server. It offers a highly available, scalable, cloud-hosted PostgreSQL service, integrated with Azure's ecosystem for enriched applications through Azure Functions, App Service, and AI. It allows independent scaling of compute and storage, enhancing cost efficiency and operational flexibility. Key features include zone-redundant high availability, advanced security with Azure Private VNet, data encryption, and Azure Active Directory authentication. Supporting the latest PostgreSQL versions and extensions, it ensures access to the newest features, while contributions to the PostgreSQL community highlight our commitment to ecosystem growth. With a global presence, it ensures low latency and worldwide reach, making it a premier choice for leveraging PostgreSQL in the cloud. Additionally, we offer Azure CosmosDB for PostgreSQL, a horizontally scalable Postgres service powered by the Citus open source extension. This enables efficient distribution across a cluster, catering to high-performance and large-scale applications.
- What makes your company a great place to work?
-
Microsoft is known for providing great work-life balance to its employees. We have very flexible working conditions (working times & locations). That said, what makes Microsoft a really great place to work is two of its core values: diversity and growth mindset. Microsoft truly pays attention to diverse hiring. We do not only pay attention to diversity in gender identities & geographical backgrounds, but also strive for diverse educational backgrounds by preferring skills-first approach to credentials-first approach in hiring. This way, we get to work with colleagues from different social and educational backgrounds (e.g., computer scientists, robotics engineers, mechanical engineers, and former academics, all in the same team), and we learn something new from them every single day. Add to this the growth mindset – each of us is encouraged to design our own career path, try new things every year, fail fast and learn from our failures, and rinse and repeat. So, even though we may stay in the same role under the same team for years, our responsibilities and tasks change every year (sometimes, quarterly), which makes it a fun and nourishing (albeit challenging) environment to work in.
- How do you foster diversity in your company?
-
At Microsoft, we foster diversity through inclusive hiring practices, diversity training, employee resource groups, mentorship programs, leadership commitment, fair policies, and community engagement. Our goal is to create a workplace where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their unique perspectives and talents.
- Which of your company's contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference) are you most proud of?
-
Microsoft’s PostgreSQL Committers & Contributors team makes many changes to upstream PostgreSQL. In recent releases, our group made significant contributions to new features in the logical replication space, query layer, statistics, direct I/O, performance improvements & many other areas of PostgreSQL. Over time, along with other community members, our team has contributed significantly in putting together the CI/CD environment for PostgreSQL. This environment now is run for every patch sent to the mailing list and official builds. Other developers in the community have continued adding new tests to this environment. Over the course of time CI/CD has caught many breaking changes before they went into mainstream code, helped new & veteran developers get early feedback on their patch quality, and prevented breakages on various supported platforms. It's hard to point out one area we are proud of (because we are proud of many), the contributions to CI/CD standup and stabilization which enhances the inclusivity for PostgreSQL development by many magnitudes is one of the proudest contributions from our company. Find out more about Microsoft’s contributions to Postgres in this blog post.
- Which PostgreSQL extension do you benefit from most, and why?
-
The Citus extension to Postgres benefits Microsoft the most. Citus enables us to offer our customers the Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL managed service that scales out Postgres by distributing data & queries across a cluster. And it’s simple to add nodes & rebalance shards for growth. Citus speeds up queries by 20x to 300x (or more) through parallelism, keeping more data in cluster memory, higher aggregated I/O bandwidth across all cluster nodes, and columnar compression. The Citus distribution can also be easily combined with native Postgres partitioning making it right for extra-large time series workloads. As an extension to Postgres, it’s easy to keep Citus in sync with the latest Postgres releases & stay current with all the latest innovations in its community. Of course Citus is 100% open source, so anyone who doesn’t need a fully managed cloud service can gain the benefits of Citus too.
- What makes you want to attend the PGConf.DE conference?
-
Community conferences are genuinely nice places to meet our customers and spread knowledge about Microsoft contribution to open source in general and PostgreSQL ecosystem specifically. PGConf.DE is one of such great community events. We always look forward to listening to interesting talks, engaging in hallway track discussions, meeting good old #postgresfriends, and of course, making some new ones!