Category: All posts
Dec 11, 2023
We used to be a database company with a cloud product. Now, we are a cloud company with a database product.
Today, we are excited to announce some major changes. These changes represent another step in our journey as we build the next great database company to power the future of computing:
These changes represent an evolution of our business. We used to be a database company with a cloud product. Now we are a cloud company with a database product.
This is the new Timescale.
And this is just the beginning. There is much more to come in the next few months.
To see the new Timescale, please visit our new website.
To learn more about these changes, please read on.
We first launched Timescale over six years ago. In those years, we had a front-row seat to a major shift in developer needs to the cloud. Back then, cloud was an afterthought, just one way to deploy database software.
But today, we see the dominance of cloud-first architectures, where developers often choose not between database software products but between database cloud products.
By continuing to embrace the cloud, we have an opportunity to reinvent the database
Working with thousands of companies, we have realized this: the cloud is a tectonic shift in how software infrastructure is distributed and consumed, and we are still in the early stages of this change. By continuing to embrace the cloud, we have an opportunity to reinvent the database.
When we started this company, “cloud-native” was already a common buzzword, so we assumed the industry had already figured out how to build cloud-native databases.
But as we started listening to our customers and built solutions to their problems, we realized there was still a lot of untapped potential in what a database could offer in the cloud.
For example, over a year ago, we began developing Tiered Storage, a feature launched earlier this year in early access. This unique capability, exclusively available in our cloud product, enables developers to effortlessly scale PostgreSQL tables from disk to object storage, achieving limitless database scalability at a minimal cost.
We could have chosen to build this feature in our database software product. But by building it natively in our cloud offering, we were able to deliver a far better user experience for customers in a far shorter amount of time.
Based on that experience, we have identified and are now developing more cloud-native features to solve big developer problems. Today’s changes are setting the foundation for that future work.
The first major change we are making today is renaming our cloud product from “Timescale Cloud” to just “Timescale.”
As we started to consider more and more cloud-native database architectures, we realized that the “cloud” suffix felt like an anachronism, a symbol of the past, something redundant. It felt like calling your iPhone a “Smart Phone.” It’s just a phone.
Just like most people today have a phone that is “smart,” we believe most developers will soon be consuming their database infrastructure via a “cloud” platform.
At the same time, we have a large open-source community of tens of thousands of businesses using our TimescaleDB open-source product. So we will continually develop features in that extension—but only when it provides the best user experience. E.g., improvements to hypertables, compression, and continuous aggregates—some key features that define TimescaleDB—will continue to occur inside the extension.
Timescale is more than just a PostgreSQL extension. Timescale is “supercharged PostgreSQL” (or PostgreSQL++): PostgreSQL made easier, faster, and more cost-effective
So our PostgreSQL extension will remain “TimescaleDB.” But our main product will be “Timescale,” which will continue to offer TimescaleDB, but also much more, like Tiered Storage.
Last December, we finalized a completely new brand for Timescale. It was hard to keep this a secret, and today, five months later, we are thrilled to finally share this with you.
This rebrand underscores our evolution as a company. We started with building a PostgreSQL extension for time series, but now Timescale is more than just a PostgreSQL extension. Timescale is “supercharged PostgreSQL” (or PostgreSQL++): PostgreSQL made easier, faster, and more cost-effective. So we wanted to inject a “charged” feeling into the identity system.
We updated our color palette to support our evolved identity.
We retained yellow as the primary color but amped it to an “electric” version that feels bolder while using darker background colors to highlight the contrast.
The story behind the color: during an especially fun brainstorming session, one of us (Ajay) was reminiscing about playing Street Fighter II as a kid at his best friend’s house and how one of the characters “electrified” as their special move. And thus, “Blanka yellow” became the inspiration behind our primary color, “electric yellow.”
Along with the yellow, we added a more restrained blue and purple in the palette to give us the flexibility to shift and project a warm, softer image when necessary.
This color palette is now expressed in our website, cloud console, and docs.
We have always embraced the “tiger” as the personification of our database: fast and powerful. We now have a new tiger logo, which pays tribute to our brand’s heritage while also evolving it to feel more modern, innovative, and optimistic.
The new Timescale tiger is forward-facing, signaling an innovative, forward-looking, optimistic company. It is less aggressive and more hopeful. It is also designed to scale up and down more easily.
The tiger “stripes” carry through to the entirety of the identity system. Dynamic and twisting, they are inspired by data: ever-changing, alive, and on the move.
This is just the beginning. With these changes today, we are laying the groundwork for more awesomeness as we continue to serve developers worldwide and power the future of computing. Stay tuned.
