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Launch HN: Ardent (YC P26) – Postgres sandboxes in seconds with zero migration
Hey HN! We’re Vikram and Evan from Ardent (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
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.
Looks 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?
We 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!
“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.
One 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.
Hi, site looks beautiful!
How does this compare to managing our own read-only replica with anonymized data?
A 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
Ardent adds extra dependencies and cost.
Doesn'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
How many people are giving an LLM Agent full read access to their production data? That seems nuts to me.
I'm much more worried about people who give full write access to their agents! But at least this solves that problem.