If you read today’s announcement, you know Percona has a lot to say about what’s broken in modern data infrastructure. Lock-in dressed up as openness. Costs that climb while control shrinks. Vendors who made “managed” mean giving up visibility instead of gaining it.
When we decided to stop being quiet about all of it, to build an identity that actually reflected what Percona believes and what Percona does, we had a choice to make. Every brand needs a symbol.
Not a lion. Not an eagle. Not something abstract that a committee agreed was inoffensive. A goat. And if that surprises you, you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about goats.
Most tech company mascots are chosen to project power or aspiration. They roar or soar or look good on a t-shirt at a conference. That’s fine if your brand is built on image.
Percona has spent 20 years doing the unglamorous, load-bearing work of keeping databases running, patching at 3:00 a.m., telling customers the honest answer when it wasn’t the comfortable one, building freely available open source software because we believed the industry deserved better than what vendors were offering. None of that is lion territory. It’s goat territory.
Goats don’t perform. They just get the job done, wherever you put them. That’s Percona.
Goats survive where other animals don’t bother trying. Percona builds for always-on, mission-critical workloads, the ones where downtime isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a crisis. Your database goes down at 2:00 a.m. on a holiday weekend? We’re already on it. That’s not a marketing line. That’s the job.
Goats don’t belong to anyone. Neither does open source, when it’s done right. Percona has spent its entire existence making sure organizations can run technologies like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis and Valkey without a single vendor holding the keys. The goat is a symbol of that freedom. The brand is the declaration of it.
Mountain goats thrive on cliff faces, in forests, on open plains. Percona software runs on-premises, in the cloud, and across hybrid environments with the same reliability. Your infrastructure changes. Your database platform shouldn’t have to.
Goats navigate terrain that would stop most animals cold. Percona engineers work in the same kind of environments: sprawling multi-database estates, legacy migrations, compliance frameworks that make your head spin. We don’t freeze up when the terrain gets steep. That’s what 20 years of experience looks like.
In mountainous regions, goats have led other animals along safe paths for centuries. Percona does the same for database teams navigating scale, modernization, and architectural change. We’ve walked the path before. We know where the drop-offs are.
Mountain goats aren’t herd animals. They don’t move in packs or wait for the group to decide. They operate independently, come together when it matters, and the strongest ones lead. Percona’s community works the same way, contributors, forum regulars, Percona Live speakers, the engineer who filed that bug report at midnight, each of them doing the work on their own terms, sharing knowledge freely when it counts. No paywalls. No gatekeeping. Just people who know their terrain and aren’t shy about it.
Here’s what the new brand isn’t: a reinvention. Percona hasn’t changed what it believes or what it does. What’s changed is that we have 20 years of credibility behind us, a clearer picture of what’s broken in the industry, and no remaining appetite for being polite about it.
The goat isn’t a departure from who Percona has always been. It’s the most honest representation of it we’ve ever put on paper.
The Way Is Open. It always was. We’re just saying it louder now.
*Want to know more about what’s driving the rebrand? Read the full announcement here
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