I didn't start Kopi as a business idea: I started it as a solution to my own frustration.
After decades consulting for banks and enterprises, I saw the same pattern everywhere: automated pipelines, containerized apps, sub-minute builds... and then chaos when it came to databases.
1. The "Restore" Insanity
Until now, validation meant restoring a full backup. It sounds simple, but it begs a fundamental question: Why do I have to restore everything when I only need a fraction of it?
Why restore 500 tables when my feature only touches 4 of them? Why wait hours to restore 10 years of Sales history when I'm just fixing a bug in the User Profile service? It's nuts!
We treat databases as monolithic blocks, forcing developers to carry the weight of the entire production environment just to write a few lines of code. It's inefficient, it's slow, and it kills velocity.
2. The "Shared Server" Nightmare
When restores take too long (or fail), teams pivot to the "Shared Dev Server." That’s just trading one problem for another. It’s the Wild West.
You run a migration - I lose my test user. I run a cleanup script - you lose your order history. We're not coding: we're stepping on each other's toes. I wanted isolation without the overhead.
3. The Lie of Mocking
So we retreat to mocks. We write beautiful in-memory tests that pass in milliseconds. Then we deploy, and the app explodes because the real database has a constraint my mock didn't know about.
Mocks validate logic, but they don't validate reality. I wanted the speed of a mock with the honesty of a real engine.
4. The Danger of Stale Data
Even if I did manage to restore a backup locally, how old is it? A week? A month?
Because restoring is such a painful, multi-hour process, we hoard our local database state. We don't refresh it because "it takes too long." I've definitely been guilty of this. This leads to Drift. We end up building features against a version of the world that no longer exists, and bugs slip through because our local schema is a migration behind production.
The Kopi Solution
Kopi is my answer to these problems. It creates containerised, lightweight, local replicas of production databases in seconds. No more waiting hours for restores, no more shared servers, and no more fragile mocks.
Kopi replicates your entire production DB schema, functions, stored procedures etc. and only provides the exact data you need for the exact tables you specify (Kopi automatically finds related tables and generates data for those too). It’s fast, isolated, and disposable.
With a single command, kopi up, developers get their own isolated
database in a local container that mirrors production. Spin up a fresh copy in
seconds, run your tests, and discard it when you're done. It's like having a production database
in your pocket.
Kopi lets you treat databases like code: fast, isolated, and disposable. It eliminates the data friction that slows down modern development.
Treat your databases like cattle, not pets.
Kopi isn't "enterprise software" designed by a committee. It’s a developer tool, forged in the fires of actual production deadlines. It gives you the data you need, gets out of your way, and lets you do your job.