- Control plane: Operated by Ardent. Handles branch coordination, replication health monitoring, connection routing, auto-scaling, and policy enforcement. Spans across all deployments.
- Data plane: Where your data lives. Includes Ardent’s replication pipeline, your read replica, and your branches. Can be deployed on your cloud or ours.
How it works
Control plane
Always operated by Ardent. Coordination, policies, routing, and visibility across every branch and connection.- Branch lifecycle: Create, suspend, delete, and route traffic to the right branch. Connection URLs route through Ardent’s proxy. Every session is tied to an account, policies apply per branch, and raw URLs never leak.
- Replication coordination: Ardent watches replication health and scales the Kafka layer that backs it, so you never have to size or operate brokers yourself.
- Connector setup: When you connect a database, Ardent inspects and validates it, and gives you connector-level settings: the default database name for new branches, and any SQL to run on each new branch.
- Auth, usage, and billing: Org access, API keys, and usage tracking. Per-user and per-branch visibility Postgres does not give you out of the box.
Data plane
Where your data physically lives and where branches are served from. Runs on Ardent’s infrastructure (fully managed) or in your own cloud account (managed, your cloud).- Ardent Replicator
- Takes logical replication from production through a Kafka-backed pipeline into the read replica.
- Handles DDL in flight using custom event triggers that detect DDL on the primary and replay it in order on the replica — schema and data changes stream together with no gaps, duplicates, or silent drift, even across failures and retries.
- Manages WAL and slot pressure so replication does not destabilize the primary.
- Quarantines, resumes, and recovers broken streams without manual replay scripts.
- Read replica: Stays in sync with production; branches are always created from the replica, never from production directly, so branch load never hits your primary.
- Branches (compute and storage): Each branch is a full Postgres instance cloned from the replica with compute that auto-scales with load. Branches share storage from the same replica through copy-on-write, so scaling to many branches is efficient for both compute and storage.
- Isolation: Your data stays inside this boundary. Only metadata crosses to the control plane. This means in managed, your cloud mode you can maintain residency of all your data without losing Ardent’s ability to manage the service.
Deployment options
Ardent manages everything from our control plane. The data plane is the only thing that moves.
Fully managed. We host the entire data plane. Connect your database and we handle the Ardent Replicator, Kafka pipeline, read replica, and branch compute.
Managed, your cloud. Same managed experience, but the data plane deploys into your own cloud account. Your data never leaves your infrastructure. The control plane still manages everything via API; all replication and branch compute runs inside your network.