Fork a service

Fork an Aiven service to create a complete and independent copy of it from its latest backup.

For services with Point in Time Recovery (PITR), you can choose to fork from the latest transaction or from a specific point in time. Forked services are independent and don't share resources with or increase the load on the original service. Common use cases for forking include:

• Creating a snapshot to analyze an issue.
• Creating a development copy of your production environment.
• Testing upgrades before applying them to production services.
• Creating an instance in a different cloud provider, region, or with a different plan.
• Renaming a service.

You can fork the following Aiven services:

• Apache Cassandra®
• Caching
• ClickHouse®
• Grafana®
• Metrics
• MySQL
• OpenSearch®
• PostgreSQL®

When you fork a service, the service configurations, databases, service users, and connection pools are copied to the new service.

Limitations

• You can only fork services that have at least one backup.
• Service integrations are not copied over to the forked versions.
• You cannot fork Aiven for ClickHouse® or Aiven for Apache Cassandra® services to a lower amount of nodes.
• Single sign-on (SSO) methods are not copied over to forked Aiven for OpenSearch® services because they are linked to specific URLs and endpoints, which change during forking. If you don't configure the SSO methods for the forked service, this can disrupt user access.

Fork a service

Console

1. Log in to Aiven Console.
2. In your project, click Services and click the service to fork.
3. Click Backups and click Fork & restore.
4. Configure the new service and click Create fork.

CLI

Use the create service command with the service_to_fork_from parameter to specify the service to use as the source.

The following example creates a fork of a PostgreSQL® service named source-pg and names it pg-fork.

avn service create pg-fork \
  --plan business-4 \
  --project example-project \
  --service-type pg \
  --cloud google-europe-west1 \
  --service-to-fork-from source-pg

To specify the backup to fork from, add the --recovery-target-time parameter and set it to a time between the first and latest available backups. The following example creates a fork by specifying the backup:

avn service create pg-fork \
  --plan business-4 \
  --project example-project \
  --service-type pg \
  --cloud google-europe-west1 \
  --service-to-fork-from source-pg \
  --recovery-target-time "2025-07-01T15:16:22+00:00"

API

Use the ServiceCreate endpoint and set the service_to_fork_from parameter in the user_config property to the source service.

The following example creates a fork of a PostgreSQL service from the latest backup of the service source-pg-service:

curl --location 'https://console.aiven.io/v1/project/example-project/service' \
     --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     --header 'Authorization: token' \
     --data '{
        "cloud":"google-europe-central2",
        "plan":"business-4",
        "service_name":"pg-fork",
        "service_type":"pg",
        "user_config":{
          "service_to_fork_from":"source-pg-service",
        }
     }'

To specify the backup to fork from, set the recovery_target_time to a time between the first and latest available backups.

The following example forks a PostgreSQL service from a backup taken at a specific point in time:

curl --location 'https://console.aiven.io/v1/project/example-project/service' \
     --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     --header 'Authorization: token' \
     --data '{
        "cloud":"google-europe-central2",
        "plan":"business-4",
        "service_name":"pg-fork",
        "service_type":"pg",
        "user_config":{
          "service_to_fork_from":"source-pg-service",
          "recovery_target_time": "2024-06-01T12:00:00+00:00",
        }
     }'

Terraform

Use the service_to_fork_from attribute in the user config of your service resource.

The following example creates a fork of a PostgreSQL service. The source service is in the Google Cloud europe-west1 region and the fork is in the AWS eu-central-1 region.

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To specify the backup to fork from, set the recovery_target_time attribute to a time between the first and latest available backups.

More information on the service resources and their configuration options are available in the Terraform documentation.

During the forking process, the fork might initially have only one node while backups are being taken. The other nodes appear after the backup process is complete.

Related pages

• Create a service