7 ms·
Launch HN: Ardent (YC P26) – Postgres sandboxes in seconds with zero migration
Hey HN! We’re Vikram and Evan from Ardent (https://tryardent.com https://tryardent.com). We're building database sandboxes for you and your coding agents.
In the last two years coding agents have gotten dramatically more capable at handling complex engineering tasks. But without access to a realistic sandbox at the DB layer for testing, they ship garbage that can take down production databases. I spent over a year building an AI Data Engineer that failed for this exact reason. Evan spent the last 12 years in data engineering and hit this wall building agents at his last company.
Ardent was built to make it possible for coding agents to get near instant access to production-like sandboxes so they can test their work. To do this we write a replication stream out of the target DB, scaling with kafka onto a read replica with copy on write enabled and autoscaling compute (we currently prefer neon as a primary branching engine due to their implementation of these properties).
Our replication stream uses logical replication + ddl triggers to enable usage on any hosted postgres DB since most platforms do not allow physical replication which is traditionally used for creating replicas.
This provides a few primary benefits:
1. Does not require a platform migration to a DB provider like neon, allowing strong separation of production and development concerns.
2. Minimal impact on the production database while allowing clones to spin up in <6s, even at TB scale with copy-on-write
Security matters a lot with cloning production so we run a proxy layer to generate custom postgres URLs and route all connections to allow more granular access control to clones, prevent credential leak, and follow a split plane architecture to allow full data residency on your cloud through BYOC.
We also support anonymization through the ability to register SQL that runs on branches before they are returned. This has been used for PII redaction and branch modification.
Our goal is to make every data infrastructure platform “cloneable” in one place so agents can fully test the impact of their changes on production like data environments without risk.
Here's a demo of it: https://youtu.be/5S1kwPtiRU0 https://youtu.be/5S1kwPtiRU0
We’d love to understand how you work with coding agents on the DB and if you try Ardent (it's free to get started) what worked, what broke and what’s missing.
- znnajdla 5mo ago“Never impacts production data” is impossible to guarantee. Playing with real world data often has side effects outside of the database. For example if you store oauth tokens to external services in your DB (customer integrations) it’s easy to mess up your customers data through a bad API call (been there done that). There is still value in carefully testing on your prod DB, but for that you could just easily maintain a read replica. I don’t see the need for a SaaS here.
- vc289 5mo agoOne of the main things people use us for is ease of testing writes on a per dev/agent basis which would be difficult on a read replica! On the real world data impact I absolutely agree. We added something called "branch hooks" which essentially let you define SQL to run against the branch before it's returned This lets you essentially anonymize and modify the branch to scrub unintended external side effects. It's something that we're still working on though and trying to design the right abstractions around because we want to get that part right.
- 999900000999 5mo agoIf it’s production data I probably don’t trust a random startup with it. I’m very confused as to the target market here
- vessenes 5mo agoI’ll bite. You’re a dev at random mid size company and tasked with using this newfangled agentic tech to implement an intranet feature everybody wants and nobody else wants to build. How do you get a staging and dev db together that’s going to let you test your migrations?
- 999900000999 5mo agoSpin it up my self inside our VPC ? I can only imagine this being fine for 1 person side projects.
- tommy29tmar 5mo ago[flagged]
- dang 5mo agoYour comments are getting classified by our software as LLM-generated and/or LLM-edited. It's impossible to be certain, of course, but if this is the case—can you please not do this? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079. We end up banning accounts that do this repeatedly and I don't want to ban you. LLMs are amazing and we use them heavily ourselves - but not for modifying text that is to be posted to HN. Doing so leaves imprints on the language that readers are increasingly allergic to, and we want HN to be a place human conversation.
- nilirl 5mo agoHi, site looks beautiful! How does this compare to managing our own read-only replica with anonymized data?
- xnx 5mo agoArdent adds extra dependencies and cost.
- vc289 5mo agoA true read replica won't let you write! So if you need to test something like a backfill and see if anything goes wrong you wouldn't be able to quite as easily. We'd let you instantly clone prod + user defined auto-anonymization so you can test writes. The architecture also somewhat takes the place of an existing read replica if you want to use it like that to make it more cost efficient. Also since we're using copy on write for the clones they're incredibly storage efficient and the autoscaling compute helps minimize cost on clones by minimizing excess compute uptime
- jagged-chisel 5mo ago> A true read replica won't let you write! I mean, they said "read-only" ...
- cphoover 5mo agoHow many people are giving an LLM Agent full read access to their production data? That seems nuts to me.
- jedberg 5mo agoI'm much more worried about people who give full write access to their agents! But at least this solves that problem.
- cphoover 5mo agoJedberg... Wow an internet legend replied to me! >< > I'm much more worried about people who give full write access to their agents! But at least this solves that problem. Yeah it goes without saying that write access would be crazy... But, it seems like people don't really care about the fact that they are just giving their private data to companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. > Branch anonymization Branches default to a full copy of your production data. <-- This doesn't seem a safe default to me... Perhaps a data policy should be required to be in place before a branch can be cloned... The default configuration giving the LLM full prod data access by default, is a bad standard to set, I think.
- jedberg 5mo ago> Jedberg... Wow an internet legend replied to me! Hey, I put on my pants the same way you do: by having my staff hold them up while I jump into them. > But, it seems like people don't really care about the fact that they are just giving their private data to companies like Anthropic/Open AI and Google. This isn't quite as risky as it seems. All of them have a TOS that says if you pay them enough money they won't train on your data. But you're right that there are probably a lot of people who aren't on those plans sharing private data. > > Branch anonymization Branches default to a full copy of your production data. > <-- This doesn't seem a safe default to me... Agreed, and I'm sure it will cause trouble if you don't also bring along with the copies the internal controls around access logging. But also, for smaller companies, this isn't an issue since they don't have SOC2 and the other compliance needs yet. So it's probably a sane starting place for Ardent at this time. Most small startups let everyone in the company access the full database anyway. > Perhaps a data policy should be required to be in place before a branch can be cloned... The default configuration giving the LLM full prod data access by default, is a bad standard to set, I think. Or at least an easy way to copy it from the database you're branching from.
- jedberg 5mo agoLooks interesting, curious what your moat here is. What prevents Supabase/Neon from doing this? Actually don't they already do this? How does this differ from the branching Neon and Supabase already offer?
- vc289 5mo agoWe enable branching on any postgres DB through our architecture. So if you're on RDS, Planetscale, etc you can keep your DB where it is but also get the ability to branch with a full clone of the DB. Neon does support copy on write branching natively and autoscaling compute but you make certain performance tradeoffs. A lot of the folks we've talked to that use RDS or Planetscale are reliant on things like query latencies supported by that platform's specific architecture but also want the ability to test on branches. We let you get the best of both worlds (branch but leave your DB where it is and freely choose your production environment based on prod concerns) Supabase does have branching but they do not branch the data so you can't test any interactions that rely on the data. You can restore from backup as an option but this slows down based on data size since you're actually moving data as opposed to copy on write. Longer term we want to be the place you branch all your data infra. So expanding to S3, Snowflake, MySQL etc. For now though we're focusing on just postgres and getting it right!
- dou99 5mo agoYou’re literally using Neon? lol
- fmajid 5mo agoDoesn't look open-source. If you are interested in having a Neon or git-like branching for PostgreSQL experience, have a look at Xata, which is based on ZFS like Delphix was: https://github.com/xataio/xata https://github.com/xataio/xata
- polskibus 5mo agoWould such approach work for MS SQL?
- fmajid 5mo agoThere's no reason why it shouldn't, Delphix primarily targeted Oracle, but there is of course not as much open-source enthusiasm for supporting a proprietary database as an open-source one.
- fmajid 5mo agoAnd also, of course, MS-SQL is only supported on Windows, and ZFS is not available on Windows. Windows does have Volume Shadow copy Services, but they are not as capable as ZFS snapshots and clones.
- polskibus 4mo agoMS SQL has been available on Linux for around 10 years now. So is the magic basically to use ZFS and everything should work fine?
- eugercek 5mo agoIf you use xfs (+`file_copy_method=CLONE`) you can do this with Postgres 18. `CREATE DATABASE clankerdb TEMPLATE sourcedb STRATEGY=FILE_COPY;`. But Ardent can be useful for many, because cloud providers uses heavily restricted Postgres. And many use Aurora, which doesn't event let configure the `log_line_prefix`. Though if cloud providers add file_copy_method=CLONE compatible managed pg ... ref: https://boringsql.com/posts/instant-database-clones/ https://boringsql.com/posts/instant-database-clones/
- mnahkies 5mo agoI wanted to try doing something similar to this in our dev environment (think shared dev database but per branch clones), but this limitation seemed tricky to accept: > The source database can't have any active connections during cloning. I wouldn't mind some lock contention, but having to kill all connections seemed a bit harsh
- IdontKnowRust 5mo agoI guess it's still possible with a replica that no one is using? So you don't need to touch real production db? Not sure if it applies for all use cases tou
- mnahkies 5mo agoYeah I think a read replica might fit the bill - though I suspect active logical replication counts as a connection in this context. Using a cloud provider read replica might not (as I think that might use block level replication) - but then you're paying for an extra dev database host for the privilege
- the__alchemist 5mo agoHere's how I do it with Heroku. Are there some cloud services that don't have an equivalent? heroku pg:backups:capture --app x heroku pg:backups:download --app x pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -U postgres -d y local_db_for_robots_etc.dump This takes more than 6 seconds. I'm curious how they achieved that for arbitrary DBs!
- galaSerge 5mo ago[flagged]
- Serhii-Set 5mo ago[flagged]
- kramit1288 5mo ago[dead]
- heocoi 5mo ago[flagged]
- clintonb 5mo agoCongrats on the launch! DB clones have been a game changer for my team, allowing us to build isolated workspaces for agents to do work ranging from optimizing queries/views to building UI/UX that works for the actually combinations of data we have. We self-host DBLab since we had trouble getting Xata, Neon, and hosted DBLab configured.
- samokhvalov 5mo agoHey, PostgresAI founder here. thank you for using DBLab Can you DM me, please? Really curious about your experience
- dou99 5mo agoThe concept is cool but what value are you adding ontop of the Neon Twin infra it’s built on? It seems the same can be done just using Neon directly for half the cost?
- sharts 5mo agoSounds like thats all they’re doing.
- Jinyibruceli 5mo agoI ran into this exact problem building browser automation agents that needed to test DB migrations. The real killer wasn't just getting a sandbox quickly, it was that reverting changes after a failed test would take forever with traditional backup/restore. One thing I'm curious about though - how do you handle agents that need to test against production data patterns but can't actually touch real user data? Do you have a synthetic data layer or is that on the user to solve?
- vc289 5mo agoWe have ways to scrub PII/manipulate the data on the clone per branch. It's called branch hooks and lets you register SQL to be run against the branch after it's created but before it's handed to you (or an agent) So you can retain production shapes but manipulate the data however you want to make it safe
- danisaza 5mo agoCongrats on the launch! One note on the pricing: it would kind of bum me out to pay $250/month for $100/month in credit. That feels like I'm losing $150/month.
- vc289 5mo agoTotally makes sense. We do offer a pure PAYG tier (starter) that scales completely dynamically to workload But seems like this may be less about the absolute price but more about the way the 100/month of credit feels? What do you think could be better? The intention of the 250/month scale tier was intended for companies scaling up that want BYOC for data residency etc. etc. and give them enough to test things internally without worrying about an overage bill before running it directly on prod but this might be able to be implemented better.
- MehdiBelkacem 5mo ago[flagged]
- dang 5mo agoYour comments are getting classified by our software as LLM-generated and/or LLM-edited. It's impossible to be certain, of course, but if this is the case—can you please not do this? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079. We end up banning accounts that do this repeatedly and I don't want to ban you. LLMs are amazing and we use them heavily ourselves - but not for modifying text that is to be posted to HN. Doing so leaves imprints on the language that readers are increasingly allergic to, and we want HN to be a place human conversation.
- debarshri 5mo agoDoes it clone the data? We have a table with 35GB data, what happen in that case?
- IdontKnowRust 5mo agoTheir website says they clone at 6s/TB so you probably will get a branch less than 1s
- debarshri 5mo agoDoes it make it remotely? I mean, you can do that locally with ``` CREATE DATABASE cloned_db WITH TEMPLATE source_db OWNER your_owner; ```
- vc289 5mo agoIt does clone the data. It uses copy on write to clone so data size won't slow it down since it's a metadata operation instead of actual data movement It clones the entire DB so it's not quite 6s per TB but actually the entire thing takes <6s independent of size Probably something to adjust on the site to make it clearer!
- luodaint 5mo agoDrop-the-database events occur whenever the review process is bypassed. It’s “Just run it; the agent wrote it” that undermines trust. The migration may be semantically correct yet practically incorrect, such as renaming a column to break a service that is in use or creating an index that locks the table during heavy use. What Ardent does makes sense for a team setting where several agents/developers require their own environment before deploying code. But from a one-man-show founder’s perspective, the constraint is not about isolation but rather self-discipline.
- anonpolls 5mo ago[flagged]
- luodaint 5mo ago[dead]
- terekhindc 4mo ago[flagged]
- terekhindc 4mo ago[flagged]