I recently discovered Portabase, a database administration platform for systems such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. The name itself is explicit: Portabase = Port (from Portainer) + Database. The project is clearly inspired by Portainer’s operational model, but applied to database workloads.

Portabase provides core operational capabilities: backup and restore, job scheduling, retention policies, notifications, and support for multiple storage backends. It targets day-to-day database operations rather than schema design or query tooling.

What differentiates Portabase from comparable solutions is its headless agent architecture. Agents run directly on the target infrastructure and are attached to one or more database instances. The central server is restricted to orchestration, configuration, and metadata management. Credentials are never centralized: access remains local to the execution environment. This significantly reduces the attack surface and aligns with security-by-design principles.

Although the project is still under active development, its architecture is coherent and deliberately scalable. It favors distributed execution over a monolithic, server-centric model, which makes it suitable for both on-premise and heterogeneous environments. The community is still forming, but the technical foundations are solid.

GitHub: https://github.com/Portabase/portabase