DBLab Engine on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

DBLab Engine on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

DBLab Engine (Database Lab Engine) is postgres.ai's database-branching engine for PostgreSQL. It takes a snapshot of a source database and then hands out thin clones: full-size, fully writable PostgreSQL instances created in seconds that cost almost nothing on disk, because each clone shares its unchanged blocks with the snapshot and stores only what you modify.

That single property changes how teams work with production-scale data. A destructive migration can be rehearsed against real data and thrown away. A slow query can be tuned against a real plan on a real dataset. Every engineer, and every CI job, can hold a private copy of a database that would be far too large and far too slow to duplicate conventionally.

### What ships in this image

• DBLab Engine 4.1.3 and its REST API, pinned to an immutable container image digest
• The Community Edition web interface, served through nginx on port 80
• A dedicated copy-on-write pool built fresh on its own 32 GiB volume at first boot
• A bundled source database (PostgreSQL 18, 50,000 rows) so the appliance clones something real from the moment it starts
• A shipped self-test that creates a clone, writes to it, and proves the source is unchanged

### Not a crippled free tier

Snapshotting, branching and thin cloning are Community Edition features and all work on this image. The engine runs as Community Edition and never consults a billing path. postgres.ai's Standard Edition adds the hosted console, organisation-level access control and vendor support; it does not unlock engine functionality.

### Secure by default

A DBLab engine can clone entire databases, so this image treats the API and the clones as privileged. Only the web interface and SSH are reachable from the network. The engine API, the bundled source database and the entire thin-clone port range stay bound to the loopback interface, because a thin clone is a complete, writable copy of the source data; clones are reached over an SSH tunnel. No default credential ships: the verification token and the demo database password are generated uniquely per virtual machine at first boot into a root-only file, and neither the engine nor the source database can start until first boot has minted them.

### Licensing

DBLab Engine and its Community Edition UI are Apache-2.0 — free. No per-core, per-clone or per-seat fee. The cloudimg charge ($0.04 per vCPU/hour) covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 expert support.

### Getting started

Deploy, connect over SSH, read the per-VM verification token, and create your first clone through the web interface or the REST API. The paired deployment guide walks through every step with verified command output: https://www.cloudimg.co.uk/guides/dblab-engine-on-ubuntu-24-04-azure/