Introducing Fortress… helping SaaS handle customer data responsibly
Hey everyone! We are the founders of 🏰 Fortress, an orchestration platform for SaaS applications, allowing them to easily manage a multi-instance database architecture (a hybrid of dedicated and shared instances) in their own cloud.
We are a team of 22 year olds, currently in the YC S24 batch. In this post, we want to share why we are working on a database platform.
🏮 Our Story:
John and Will were friends since High School, and have been building software together since 14. John got his start in programming from building a flight simulator community while Will had become a contributor in the open-source Neovim community. David and John were friends and CS partners at Brown University, where they both recently graduated. David was originally interested in philosophy (he was pre-law initially) but became passionate about CS and started building projects in his free time.
As a team, they were passionate about data privacy and have always been fascinated by the possibilities of a world of db-per-tenant. Originally, our product was an open-sourced data privacy vault for PII/PCI data for LLM apps using sensitive data in workflows but we soon realized that the bigger problem our batchmates had was handling their customers' data in siloed environments.
🚩 The Tangible Problem:
We learned that SaaS companies follow these two trends as they grow:
- ☁️ They mature off 3rd party managed database platforms and move into their own cloud (on to an AWS/GCP/Azure) for cost, latency, and for more control of their data.
- 🏗️ They move from a single shared database architecture to a multi-instance database architecture (hybrid of dedicated and shared instances) for performance, compliance, and due to the data isolation requirements of enterprise clients.
Existing cloud-native managed database services not only have complex docs and SDKs, but orchestrating separate database instances requires additional DevOps: deployments, schema migrations, connection pooling, versioning across instances.
Fortress aims to provide SaaS applications the ideal database platform as they scale. With the rise of BYOC, we realized that we had an opportunity to build a new-age DBaaS that leveraged the recent innovations in databases and bring it into our customer’s private cloud.
🏰 What we offer:
- ☁️ In your own cloud: Host your database instances in your own cloud for security and reduced vendor lock-in (and use your cloud credits!). We also have a fully-managed service!
- 🛠️ Simplified DevOps: Global schema migrations and rollbacks, versioning, and managed connection routing
- 👥 Tenant Management: APIs/SDKs to support easy provisioning of a dedicated instance for larger enterprise clients and easily add smaller clients to shared instances.
- ✨ Developer-friendliness: Easy-to-use client SDKs and ORM integrations.
- 🚀 Flexible Deployment: Deploy the database instance closer to your customer or to a specific region for compliance or reduced latency.
- 🔒 Security: Managed network isolation, custom Role-based Access Control for each database, encryption in transit and at rest, by default, simplified compliance audits, and tenant data deletion.
- 🧤 White glove migration: For now, we will do white glove migration to our platform :)
🌟 Future plans?
- 🌿 Schema Branching (branch current schema states and or freeze them for development)
- 🔄 Zero-downtime schema migrations
- ⚙️ Experimental: Storage-compute separation to allow scaling to near 0 with Postgres in your own cloud