The right questions
to ask right now
Your infrastructure was built for humans. One developer, a few PRs, maybe 5 test environments. AI agents changed the math — and the companies winning aren't deploying cleverer agents. They're deploying better infrastructure.
Three problems every platform team is facing
Which of these is causing you the most friction right now?
Cost
What does staging infrastructure actually cost you today?
Full database replicas at 1TB+ run $3-8K each per month. At 50 concurrent environments, that's $250K/month in staging alone. And this gets worse, not better, as you scale agents.
Sound familiar?
- CFO questioning the staging infrastructure line item
- Under-provisioning environments to save costs
- Developers sharing databases because replicas are too expensive
Speed
How long does it take to provision a staging database?
Full data copies take 4-8 hours. Agents don't wait. When provisioning is slow, developers and agents work around it — stale data, skipped tests, shared databases. That's where the real risk lives.
Sound familiar?
- Developers skipping integration tests because environments take too long
- Agents running against stale or incomplete data
- Preview environments that are schema-only, no production data
Safety
Who has access to production PII in non-production environments?
Shared staging databases mean one agent's migration breaks everyone else's environment. And if staging contains real PII, every agent and developer with access is a compliance exposure.
Sound familiar?
- Agents running mutations on shared staging and corrupting state
- Real customer data in dev environments
- Restricting agent capabilities to avoid database damage
Solutions built for how you work
Enterprise Engineering
VPs of Engineering, Platform teams at 100+ engineers
No migration required. Connect existing RDS, Aurora, or Cloud SQL and give every engineer an isolated, anonymized branch in seconds. BYOC keeps data in your cloud.
Learn morePlatforms & Partners
Developer platforms, SaaS with per-tenant databases
Offer your users isolated Postgres databases at near-zero marginal cost. Copy-on-write branches, scale-to-zero compute, capacity-based pricing — no per-branch fees.
Learn moreAI & ML Teams
AI infrastructure teams, ML platform engineers
Isolated database per agent execution. Spawn from a known snapshot for deterministic testing. Branches scale to zero between runs. Agents never touch real customer data.
Learn moreCommon patterns
Agent Sandboxes
Isolated database per agent execution. Spawn, run, destroy — at near-zero cost.
CI/CD & Preview Envs
Branch per pull request, branch per test run. Full production data, not just schema.
Dev & Staging
Production-like data without the risk. Every developer gets their own branch.
Multi-Tenant Provisioning
Per-tenant databases at near-zero marginal cost. Copy-on-write makes it economical.
Questions worth asking
If you're evaluating database branching platforms, these are the questions that separate good from great.
- 1
How many concurrent staging/dev databases do you run today?
- 2
What does it cost to provision a full replica of production?
- 3
How long does provisioning take — and do developers wait or work around it?
- 4
Do non-production environments contain real PII?
- 5
Are you using or planning to deploy AI coding agents at scale?
- 6
Is your production Postgres on RDS, Aurora, Cloud SQL, or self-hosted?
Let's scope it for your team.
See how Xata fits your stack, your scale, and your security requirements.