How Vela Works

Overview

What is Vela
Key concepts
Why use Vela

Workflows

Branching / Cloning
Time Travel

Platform

Scale to Zero
Storage & Compute

Key concepts

The mental model behind Vela: branch data like code, point-in-time bookmarks for safety, and stateless compute attached to fast shared storage. These principles make environments instant, portable, and affordable.

Copy-on-Write Branches

Create isolated branches in seconds. Data blocks are shared until changed, so large databases clone instantly and cheaply.

Bookmarks & Time Travel

Capture consistent points in time for audits, disaster recovery, and safe rollbacks. Treat data history like a Git graph.

Scale to Zero

Suspend idle compute automatically to cut costs to near-zero while storage remains durable and ready to resume instantly.

Storage/Compute Separation

Compute instances are stateless. Fast, durable NVMe-backed storage serves multiple branches with high throughput.

RBAC & IAM

Postgres roles plus platform-level access control. Integrate with SSO providers and enforce least privilege across teams.

Plain PostgreSQL

100% PostgreSQL compatibility. Standard drivers and SQL. Bring your favorite extensions and tools.

What is Vela

Vela is a PostgreSQL platform with a BaaS experience: instant provisioning, self-service branches, safe rollbacks, and observability out of the box. Unlike black-box serverless databases, Vela uses plain Postgres so you keep portability and control.

Developer-first console, CLI, and API
Works with existing Postgres drivers and ORMs
Designed for BYOC and on-prem deployments

Core capabilities

Instant copy-on-write branching with per-branch policies and quotas
Bookmarks with metadata for compliance, audits, and reproducibility
Usage metering and cost controls per project, branch, and team

Kubernetes-native runtime

Compute runs in containers or KubeVirt-powered VMs, orchestrated by Kubernetes for scheduling, isolation, and automation. Storage is provided by a high-performance, NVMe-backed distributed layer.

Multi-tenant isolation

HA & backups

Observability

Policy & quotas

Deployment options

AWS BYOC

GCP BYOC

Azure BYOC

Bare metal

Air‑gapped

Why use Vela

Faster teams

Spin up production-like environments per feature. Ship confidently with real data and isolated changes.

Right-sized costs

Scale compute up or down per branch and suspend idle environments automatically.

Enterprise controls

RBAC, audit trails, and strict isolation. Keep compliance while developers move fast.

Lower-risk releases

Bookmark and branch around every release to ensure instant rollback and precise forensics.

Portable & OSS-aligned

Plain PostgreSQL means standard SQL, drivers, and extensions—no lock‑in.

Unified workloads

Run OLTP, analytics, vector, and time‑series together with predictable performance.

Postgres Branching / Cloning

Create independent branches from any point in time. Branches inherit data blocks and diverge on write, so even multi‑TB databases clone instantly. Each branch has its own connection string and resource policy.

How it works

Copy‑on‑write: unchanged blocks are shared across branches; modified blocks are written once.
Per-branch limits: vCPU, RAM, and IOPS can be set independently.
Branch merges are performed using SQL or migration tools against the parent.

Typical workflow

Create a branch from production or a bookmark.
Run tests and apply schema changes safely.
Promote or discard; only changed data incurred extra storage.

Demonstration of branching and clone workflows.

Postgres Time Travel

Bookmarks capture consistent snapshots you can return to at any time. Use them to protect releases, run historical analyses, or recreate incidents exactly as they happened.

Bookmarks

Immutable reference points with metadata for audit and compliance.

Checkout

Attach any bookmark to a compute environment to reproduce a state precisely.

Branch from history

Create branches from the past for safe fixes, tests, and investigations.

Workflows

Create bookmarks before risky migrations or releases.
Checkout an older bookmark to reproduce and debug issues.
Branch from a bookmark to test hotfixes without touching prod.

Best practices

Name bookmarks consistently and include context in descriptions.
Keep sensitive data policies consistent across branches.
Restrict destructive operations via RBAC and approvals.

Postgres Scale to Zero

Idle environments are automatically suspended to eliminate compute waste. When accessed, they resume quickly with warm caches and preserved storage state.

Policies

Configure automatic suspension windows per project or branch. Resume on connect via console, CLI, or API.

Cost & performance

Reduce spend for dev/test while keeping near‑instant wake‑ups optimized for low latency.

Policy examples

Dev branches suspend after 30 minutes of inactivity.
QA suspends outside 08:00–20:00 local time.
Prod never suspends; burst scaling only.

Resume triggers

First incoming connection on the branch DSN.
Manual resume via console, CLI, or API.
Scheduled jobs (cron) before test runs.

Separation of Storage and Compute

Vela decouples compute from storage so you can right-size CPUs and memory without copying data. Shared NVMe-backed storage feeds multiple compute nodes with high throughput and low latency.