Custom-built Postgres Instance
Hydra Postgres is a fully managed Postgres database service that runs on Fly.io infrastructure. We chose Fly due to it’s unparalleled security, fair pricing, and customizability. We believe that Hydra Postgres is your Postgres instance, we just manage it for you. This means your Postgres instance should be completely isolated from other Hydra users, highly tuned, and open to running any software or extension with it without permission. Hydra databases are fully isolated and 100% in control: Hydra users have superuser access to their databases.
Platform Features
Superuser
Hydra Postgres comes with full superuser access. This allows unrestricted privileges and access to all database objects and operations. Superusers can perform any action within the database, including creating and managing other roles, modifying system catalogs, and executing administrative functions. They have the ability to override all access restrictions and can even disable security checks. While superuser access is powerful and necessary for certain administrative tasks, it should be used judiciously and granted only to trusted individuals. We recommend creating specific roles and users for applications and people that regularly access the database.
Cloud Infrastructure: Firecracker VM
Hydra runs in Firecracker microVMs infrastructure. These are lightweight, secure virtual machines based on strong hardware virtualization. Your workloads are safely isolated no matter where they’re running on our infrastructure.
MicroVMs provide strong hardware-virtualization-based security and workload isolation.
All Hydra customers are deployed on Performance VMs with dedicate hardware resources to eliminate the potential for noisy neighbors.
Dedicated physical servers have between 8-32 physical CPU cores and 32-256GB of RAM.
Add Any Postgres Extension
Extensions are awesome - they’re 3rd party software (plugins) that anyone can add to Postgres to expand it’s capabilities and features. There are tons of amazing Postgres plugins: for example, check out PostGIS, pgvector, pg_stat_statements, and pg_duckdb to start.
Traditionally, managed Postgres services like RDS, Supabase, Neon, Heroku only allow their users a few approved Postgres extensions. Every extension these vendors support typically must be deployed across the entire Postgres fleet, potentially affecting thousands of customers. To get around this classic security problem, Hydra custom builds every Postgres instance per customer. This allows Hydra users to have fully isolated Postgres with the freedom to discover and add any 3rd party Postgres plugins without permission.
Every Hydra project uses the Postgres Extension Manager, pgxman for discovery and installation of extensions. Think of pgxman like npm for Postgres extensions - it’s just one command to install plugins, one command to upgrade, and pgxman enables the local development experience to perfectly mirror production. We recommend browsing the pgxman extension registry to discover new, powerful plugins.
pgxman integrates with the system package manager, ensuring the correct versions are installed without extra packages from any shared dependencies between extensions. pgxman’s automated build system creates APT packages for each Postgres version, platform, and OS supported by the extension. Extensions are built from a buildkit formula, written in YAML, and are contributed through GitHub.
While we do plan to allow Hydra Postgres users to interact with pgxman directly in the future, if you’d like to add any Postgres extension to your database, please open a support ticket. pgxman makes it easy for our team to resolve your requests quickly.
If you’d like to add an extension that it outside of the pgxman extension registry, follow the documentation to add the new extension to the registry. Once the extension is added to the registry, we’ll have it added to your custom built Hydra Postgres instance.