Getting Started with Vela: From Account Creation to Your First Branch

Vela is designed to make working with Postgres environments feel effortless without hiding the details that engineers care about. In this walkthrough, we follow exactly what happens in the video: creating a Vela account, setting up your first organization, creating a project, and finally spinning up your first database branch.

If you have ever scripted database clones, managed long‑running restores, or waited on shared staging environments, this will feel refreshingly different.

Creating Your Vela Account

The first step is creating a Vela account.

• Open demo.vela.run.
• You are redirected to the login page, where you see two options: Sign in with Google (the quickest way to get started) or Email and password (classic username/password flow).

If you choose Google, you click the button, select your Google account, and you are redirected back to Vela with your account already created.

If you choose email sign‑up, you:

• Enter your email address, password, first and last name.
• Click Register.
• Confirm your email via the verification link that arrives right away.
• Once verified, you are immediately redirected back into Vela.

Either way, after successful sign‑up, Vela takes you into the setup flow for your first organization.

Creating Your First Organization

Right after login, you land in the organization creation wizard.

Choose your organization name. You can choose any name that makes sense for your team or company.

Both the organization name and later the project name are purely logical identifiers. They are there to help you and your teammates navigate, not to enforce any particular structure.

Once the organization is named, the wizard moves you straight into project creation.

Creating a Project

Inside an organization, you can have one or more projects. A project groups branches (databases) and defines important limits and defaults. This step is more than "just pick a name." It also sets up file storage and resource limits.

Project Name and Basics

Select your project name. You can pick anything that reflects the application or domain, like Task Manager, Billing, or Internal Tools.

So you do not have to overthink naming at this stage.

Enabling File Storage (HTTP Storage API)

Vela provides a HTTP‑based Storage API. It enables to store additional data alongside Postgres.

If your application needs to store blobs, assets, exports, or any non‑Postgres data next to your database, you want this enabled. If you only care about pure Postgres for now, you can leave it off.

Understanding Branches and Limits

It's important to understand that in contrast to some of the other solutions, Vela branches are full‑blown Postgres databases.

In other words:

• Every branch you create is a full Postgres database.
• You can clone an existing database into a new branch, copying configuration and/or data.
• That is why the UI talks about "branches," not just "databases."

Because branches are first‑class databases, Vela exposes two sets of limits in the project.

• Per‑project limit: the total resource budget for everything in the project combined.
• Per‑branch limit: the maximum allocation for any one branch in the project.

Configuring Project‑Level Resource Limits

Resource limits are split into multiple categories:

• vCPUs
• Memory (RAM)
• IOPS
• Database storage
• File storage

While vCPU, memory and IOPS is self‑explanatory, the two storage sliders might be confusing at first sight.

Database storage is the storage that is available to Postgres.

Storage is the available storage for the file storage.

So, if you enabled the file storage toggle earlier, that second storage value applies to the HTTP storage API.

For example, you can configure the following values.

• Per project: 10 vCPUs, 20 GB RAM, 100,000 IOPS, and 100 GB (database), as well as 1 GB (file storage).
• Per branch: 5 vCPUs, 10 GB RAM, 50,000 IOPS, and 50 GB (database), as well as 1 GB (file storage) for each branch.

The exact numbers are just for the demo, but the idea is:

• Per project = global budget.
• Per branch = per‑database cap inside that budget.

After you're happy with the configuration, click Create project.

Now, you are in the project overview. The project is active. But there is nothing in it yet. So let's create our first branch. Remember, a branch is a Postgres database.

Creating Your First Branch

From the project overview, choose Create branch, pick the database size, and select whether you want an empty branch or a clone from an existing database. Vela provisions it in seconds.