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Database Forking: Create Production Clones for Testing in Minutes

· 7 min read
FoundryDB Team
Engineering @ FoundryDB

Testing against realistic data is the difference between catching bugs before production and catching them in production. But getting a faithful copy of your production database into a staging environment usually means writing export scripts, waiting for dumps to transfer, provisioning infrastructure, and importing the data. For a 100 GB PostgreSQL database, that process can take hours and requires someone to babysit it.

FoundryDB's fork endpoint eliminates this entire workflow. One API call creates a fully independent copy of your database, running on its own VM with its own credentials, restored from a backup of the source service. The source database is never touched. The fork is provisioned, restored, and ready for connections in minutes.

Point-in-time recovery
RESTORED new service recovered @ T · original untouched
Databasesourcefull + WAL →RepositoryS3⇢ window · pick T →Restored @ Tnew service
Database (source)Full / base backupsWAL / binlog / oplog streamS3 repositoryRecovery window + restore pointRestored service @ T (new)

Automatic Embedding Generation: Build RAG Without the Plumbing

· 8 min read
FoundryDB Team
Engineering @ FoundryDB

Every RAG system needs the same boring middle layer: watch a table for changes, call an embedding API, write vectors back, handle retries, manage batches, build indexes, schedule cron jobs, and pray nothing drifts out of sync at 3 AM. FoundryDB's managed embedding pipelines eliminate that entire layer. You configure a pipeline, and your PostgreSQL data gets auto-vectorized with an HNSW index, ready for similarity search.

No ETL scripts. No cron jobs. No model orchestration code.

Embedding pipeline · trigger modes and runs
RUN RECORDED counts + status persisted
triggercontinuous · scheduled · manualrun →embedinference proxy⇢ vectorspgvector:5432→ recordstatussuccess · partial · failed
continuous (poll)scheduled (cron)manual (API)inference proxypgvector :5432successpartialfailed

Why We Built FoundryDB on European Infrastructure

· 7 min read
FoundryDB Team
Engineering @ FoundryDB

When we started building FoundryDB, one of the first decisions was where to run the infrastructure. The answer shaped everything that followed: we chose to build exclusively on European cloud providers, starting with UpCloud, a Finnish infrastructure company operating under EU law.

This was not a marketing decision. It was a legal and architectural one. If you store customer data in databases, the jurisdiction of the infrastructure underneath those databases determines what legal regime governs access to that data. For many organizations in Europe, this distinction is no longer optional.

One platform · one control plane · one private EU network
SOVEREIGN One control plane · one private EU network
Control Planeone APIprovisions →Service familiesdatabases · apps · files · AI · edge⇢ SDNPrivate backboneeast-west
Control planePrivate SDN backboneProvisions & managesPrivate SDN (east-west, dashed)Service families

Event Streaming with Managed Kafka: Patterns That Scale

· 7 min read
FoundryDB Team
Engineering @ FoundryDB

Event-driven architecture has moved from buzzword to baseline. If you are building microservices, real-time analytics, or data pipelines in 2026, Kafka is likely somewhere in the stack. The challenge is not whether to use it, but how to operate it without drowning in ZooKeeper configs, TLS certificate rotation, and broker rebalancing.

This post covers practical streaming patterns on FoundryDB's managed Kafka: topic design, partitioning strategies, consumer groups, schema enforcement, and monitoring. All examples use FoundryDB's Kafka 4.0 with KRaft mode and SASL/SCRAM authentication.

Partitions, replication & leader failover (KRaft)
ELECTION Broker 1 offline · ISR follower promoted to P0 leader
Produceracks=allwrite →Brokers3 · KRaft⇢ ISRread →Consumer groupmy-consumer-group
Producer writeBroker (leader)replicate to ISRConsumer readKRaft quorum :9094Failed broker

MCP Server: Connecting AI Coding Assistants to Your Databases

· 6 min read
FoundryDB Team
Engineering @ FoundryDB

Your AI coding assistant can write SQL, generate migrations, and debug queries. But when you need a database to run that code against, you leave the conversation, open a dashboard, click through a provisioning wizard, copy credentials back into your editor, and resume. That context switch breaks flow.

FoundryDB's MCP server removes it. Your AI assistant provisions databases, retrieves connection strings, checks metrics, and triggers backups without you ever leaving the conversation.

MongoDB on FoundryDB: Aggregation Pipelines, Replica Sets, and Point-in-Time Recovery

· 6 min read
FoundryDB Team
Engineering @ FoundryDB

MongoDB is one of the most popular document databases in the world, but running it in production comes with real operational overhead: replica set initialization, oplog sizing, backup orchestration, WiredTiger cache tuning, and disaster recovery planning. FoundryDB handles all of this out of the box, so you can focus on your application logic.

This post walks through provisioning a MongoDB service, running aggregation pipelines against it, and recovering from data loss using oplog-based point-in-time recovery.

MongoDB replica set, oplog replication and failover
Steady state · write to PRIMARY · oplog replicates to secondaries
Clientrs0write →Primary:27017⇢ oplogSecondary:27017Secondary:27017
write (to primary)primarysecondaryoplog replicationheartbeat (dashed)unreachable / election

Full-Text Search with Managed OpenSearch: From Zero to Production

· 7 min read
FoundryDB Team
Engineering @ FoundryDB

Every application eventually outgrows LIKE '%query%'. Once your product catalog, help center, or log pipeline crosses a few million documents, you need an inverted index, not a sequential scan. OpenSearch provides exactly that: full-text search with relevance scoring, custom analyzers, aggregations, and a visualization layer built in.

The hard part is running it. JVM heap tuning, cluster formation, TLS certificate management, shard rebalancing, and snapshot configuration turn a "quick search feature" into a permanent ops project. FoundryDB removes all of that. You get a managed OpenSearch 2.19 cluster with TLS, authentication, automated snapshots, and monitoring out of the box.

This guide walks through deploying OpenSearch on FoundryDB and building production-quality search: from provisioning to index design, full-text queries, custom analyzers, and aggregations.

OpenSearch cluster, query fan-out & gather
Cluster green · search fans out to one copy per shard, then gathers
Coordinatorfan-out / gatherquery →Data nodesP0 P1 P2 · R0 R1 R2⇠ hitsCluster-managershard allocation
Cluster-managerCoordinatorData nodePrimary shardReplica shardcluster state / gather (dashed)

Scaling Reads with PostgreSQL Read Replicas on FoundryDB

· 6 min read
FoundryDB Team
Engineering @ FoundryDB

Most PostgreSQL workloads are read-heavy. Dashboards, reporting queries, search, and API endpoints that serve cached-but-still-queried data all put pressure on a single primary. Vertical scaling helps, but at some point you are paying for CPU that only writes use while reads compete for the same connections.

Read replicas solve this by giving you additional PostgreSQL nodes that serve read queries from a continuously updated copy of your data. On FoundryDB, adding a replica takes one API call and a few minutes of provisioning time.

Streaming replication & automatic failover
Streaming replication · writes to primary, reads to replicas
DNS endpointstable namewrites →Primaryread-write⇢ WALReplicasread-only⇢ archivepgBackRestPITR
Writes (primary)Reads (replicas)WAL streamingWAL archive (PITR)Promoted primary

Predictive Autoscaling: Scale Your Database Before Demand Spikes

· 7 min read
FoundryDB Team
Engineering @ FoundryDB

Reactive autoscaling has a fundamental problem: it waits for something to go wrong. Your database hits 95% CPU, the autoscaler wakes up, requests a resize, and for the next few minutes your application eats latency while the new resources come online. If your traffic is predictable (and most production traffic is), this delay is avoidable.

FoundryDB's predictive autoscaling engine learns your workload's seasonal patterns and scales your database before demand spikes arrive. It combines real-time metric thresholds with historical baselines, anomaly detection, and configurable cost limits so you stay fast without overspending.

Vertical scaling: hot vs cold resize · online storage grow
GROW tier-4 · disk grown 200 GB · online
Servicetier-4 · 4 vCPU / 8 GBhot resize →New plan4 vCPU / 8 GBgrow only →Data disk200 GB · online
Service (resizing)New compute planReachable · online growReboot blip (cold)Data diskmounted volume (dashed)

Databases as Code: Managing FoundryDB with Terraform

· 7 min read
FoundryDB Team
Engineering @ FoundryDB

Most teams manage their application infrastructure as code but still create databases by clicking through a dashboard. The database becomes the one piece of production infrastructure that has no audit trail, no PR review, and no reproducible setup. When someone asks "why is the production database on tier-4 instead of tier-6?" the answer is usually "someone changed it last year."

The FoundryDB Terraform provider closes that gap. You declare your database services, users, and firewall rules in HCL, version them in git, and apply changes through the same CI/CD pipelines you use for everything else.

POST /projects/deploy, dependency-ordered reconciliation
RUNNING all resources provisioned · env wired
DescriptorPOST /deployfan-out →postgresRunningfilesRunningDATABASE_URL · S3_* · FOUNDRY_API_TOKEN →appRunning
DescriptorPendingProvisioning / wiringRunningDATABASE_URLS3_*auth issuer