We founded Urban Airship in May of 2009 to provide web services for mobile developers, and we had only a few weeks to launch with our first customer. In a little more than two years we've grown to more than 200 million installations and sent over 5 billion push notifications. Scaling our data layer has alway been challenging, but Postgres has been fundamental to our success.

In this talk I'll discuss how we used Postgres to as our business grew, our trials and travails (and successes) with non-relational datastores, and why we're sticking with Postgres for the majority of our future systems. I'll also discuss our challenges with virtualized environments, replication and distribution, strategies for making the most of Postgres with Python applications, and what we want from our future data storage layers.

Adam Lowry is a co-founder and developer at Urban Airship, and lives in Portland, OR.