OtterTune

» see ottertune.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

This one sat two rooms over from anything I have ever run. OtterTune sold automatic tuning for managed Postgres and MySQL on Amazon RDS, which is a problem you only acquire once you are paying a cloud provider enough every month to care what the bill says. My own databases have been small and local for twenty years. The nearest I get to this category is opening a config file and changing a number because a forum post told me to.

The company came out of Carnegie Mellon in 2020, and the research behind it was older. Dana Van Aken's doctoral work was on tuning a database management system automatically with machine learning, published and demonstrated years before anyone tried to sell it. The argument was that a modern Postgres install has hundreds of configuration knobs that almost nobody sets correctly, and that the right values can be learned from how the database actually behaves instead of guessed from a blog post. Andy Pavlo, who teaches databases at CMU and is the reason a lot of people know what a buffer pool is, was the chief executive. Bohan Zhang was the third name on the company.

The service went live in 2021 against Amazon RDS. In May 2022 it announced a $12 million Series A led by Intel Capital and Race Capital, with Accel in the round. Two years later, on 14 June 2024 at 18:45 UTC, Pavlo posted that the service was shut down and that everyone had been let go that day with a month of notice behind it. The reason given was an acquisition offer from a Postgres company backed by private equity, which fell through. Nothing more specific was ever said about which company it was.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the knobs were ~

The problem OtterTune attacked is real and it is boring, which is a difficult combination to sell. A database server ships with defaults chosen so it will start safely on any machine, not so it will run well on yours. Memory limits and vacuum thresholds have to be set against the actual workload, and the workload moves. Most teams set them once during a migration and never touch them again, which is how you end up renting an instance twice the size you need.

OtterTune's answer was to read the metrics an RDS instance already emits, compare them against models trained on other databases, and apply a configuration it believed would do better. Indexes and query shapes came later. The math was never the hard part. It was that the customer had to let an outside service change settings on a production database, and the people best equipped to judge the recommendation were the people least likely to hand over that permission.

~ the acquisition that was not ~

The public account of the ending is one post from the chief executive on the day it happened, and it is blunt in a way that corporate shutdown notices are not. The service was off and the staff was gone. The cause was named as a private-equity-backed Postgres company that had made an acquisition offer and then, in Pavlo's words, screwed them over. A deal that collapses late is worse for a startup than one that never starts, because selling stops while diligence runs and the runway burns anyway. Whether that is what happened here has never been made public. The buyer was never named, and no second account of the deal has appeared since.

~ what the tombstone says ~

ottertune.com is still up, and it is seven kilobytes of headstone. The title reads OtterTune is Dead, with the years 2020 to 2024 under it. The text runs four sentences: that OtterTune was a database tuning service start-up out of Carnegie Mellon University, that the company is dead, that the otter mascot is in prison for a parole violation, and a thank-you to the team and the investors for believing in them. Word is bond, it finishes.

Under the text are four links, and two of them are why this headstone is worth a look. The research papers and the GitHub repository are both still reachable, which means the academic work that started the whole thing outlived the business it produced. The CMU database group kept going. Pavlo still teaches the course.

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