Muhammad Usama
Microsoft, Pgpool-II
Muhammad Usama is a major contributor and committer to the Pgpool-II open-source project, specializing in performance and high availability. He has developed key features, including the HA component for Pgpool, and is currently working on global connection pooling. With 20 years of experience, he has been actively involved with PostgreSQL since 2006.
Previously, he worked at EnterpriseDB, HighGo Software, and Percona, contributing to the PostgreSQL ecosystem. Before joining Microsoft, he was the PostgreSQL lead at Percona, where he developed the open-source Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) extension for PostgreSQL.
Now a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, Muhammad is working on distributed database systems and continues to contribute to the PostgreSQL community.
POSETTE 2026 Talk
Move Less, Move Faster: Speeding Up Citus Cluster Scaling
Scaling a distributed Postgres cluster often isn’t limited by “adding a VM”, it’s limited by how long it takes to rebalance data safely. In this talk, I’ll give a minimal mental model of how Citus distributes data (shards, placements, and coordinator/worker roles), then explain why cluster scaling can feel painfully slow: data movement is expensive, and concurrency is constrained by safety and resource limits.
We’ll then look at two concrete steps toward faster elastic scaling:
Shard rebalancing improvements that increase parallelism and reduce bottlenecks.
Snapshot-based node addition, where a new worker starts as a clone of an existing one, dramatically reducing how much data needs to be copied during rebalancing.
Attendees will come away with a clearer way to reason about scaling time, plus actionable guidance for running scale-out/scale-in events safely.
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