Launch HN: Ardent (YC P26) – Postgres sandboxes in seconds with zero migration

Re:Launch HN: Ardent (YC P26) – Postgres sandboxes in second... by the__alchemist on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @07:29PM (#48129038)

Here's how I do it with Heroku. Are there some cloud services that don't have an equivalent?

  heroku pg:backups:capture --app x
  heroku pg:backups:download --app x
  pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -U postgres -d y local_db_for_robots_etc.dump

This takes more than 6 seconds. I'm curious how they achieved that for arbitrary DBs!

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Re:Launch HN: Ardent (YC P26) – Postgres sandboxes in second... by vc289 on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @08:21PM (#48129503)

We've got docs on how we did it :)

https://docs.tryardent.com/architecture

But essentially we get around the restrictions of the original DB by replicating into a different postgres compatible DB that essentially serves as a read replica. That DB is the one that branches but since it mirrors the original DB you get effective clones

By doing this we get a lot more control over what we can do to create the clones. The read replica clones using copy on write + isolated autoscaling compute to clone in 6s. We use neon to do this since we think they've implemented those two properties well.

Since it's default postgres logical replication + DDL triggers you can technically point it at any "branching enabled" db on the other end in order to achieve the same effect

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