Microsoft, which created a storm of controversy with its $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub, the world's largest repository of open source code, yesterday announced it had added another open source company to its portfolio.
This time, it's the far smaller San Francisco-based Citus Data, described in the official Microsoft announcement of the deal as "a leader in the PostgreSQL community".
The announcement was noteworthy in two regards: there was no indication of the value of the deal; and Rohan Kumar, corporate vice-president of Azure Data at Microsoft, was at pains to emphasise Microsoft's whole-hearted commitment to open source.
"Microsoft is committed to building an open platform that is flexible and provides customers with technology choice to suit their unique needs."
According to Kumar, Microsoft Azure Data Services, which includes the fully managed community-based open source relational database services spRanning MySQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB, demonstrated the company's ongoing commitment to delivering choice and flexibility. It built on Microsoft's other open source investments, SQL Server on Linux; a multi-modal NoSQL database with Azure Cosmos DB; and support for open source analytics via the Spark and Hadoop ecosystems.
Citus, which is available as a service, enterprise software as well as a free open source download, is an open source extension to PostgreSQL. It transforms PostgreSQL into a distributed database that increases performance and scale for application developers and gives enterprises the performance advantages of a horizontally scalable database.
"Since the launch of Microsoft's fully managed community-based database service for PostgreSQL last year, its adoption has surged," Kumar says. "The acquisition of Citus Data builds on Azure's open source commitment and enables us to provide the massive scalability and performance our customers demand as their workloads grow."
Citus CEO and co-founder Umur Cubukcu said the company was established eight years ago to make relational databases "horizontally scalable, resilient and worry-free" by building on PostgreSQL and its open and extensible ecosystem. It was packaged as an open source extension of PostgreSQL and more recently launched its Citus cloud database as a service.
Commenting on the deal, Cubukcu said: "Both Citus and Microsoft share a mission of openness, empowering developers, and choice. And we both love PostgreSQL. We are excited about joining forces, and the value that doing so will create.
"As part of Microsoft... we will continue to actively participate in the Postgres community, working on the Citus open source extension as well [the] other open source Postgres extensions."
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