DBaaS Use Cases in Tech

Databases are not a new thing, especially in the tech industry. With the rise of their use, databases are used left, right and centre: services like ClusterControl by Severalnines can help you with the backup and management of your database instances, with monitoring of your database instances, it can also alert you once something goes wrong in your database clusters. ClusterControl’s interface also allows you to deploy and scale your database setups effortlessly to get production ready environments in no-time. ClusterControl also comes with self-healing functionality, it lets you manage your database configurations, its automated recovery and repair functionality can help your database instances achieve high availability, it comes with performance management functionality and much more.

However, database-as-a-service services are also on the rise. As already previously noted in this blog, database-as-a-service abbreviates to DBaaS, and database-as-a-service services are useful for a wide variety of purposes:

• Database-as-a-service solutions can be used to automate your day-to-day database tasks.
• DBaaS solutions can help us quickly and easily spin up highly available database clusters in the cloud.
• Good DBaaS solutions, such as the one developed by Severalnines, also helps you avoid being locked in to a specific vendor which is really important.
• DBaaS solutions also usually have wide variety of tools you can use:
  • Some of them help you to get an overview of your database clusters.
  • Some of them help you monitor your database services (i.e. you can observe what database clusters are in use and how are they doing – are they active or not, etc.), they help you monitor everything that’s happening inside of your database clusters providing you with everything ranging from load averages, CPU and RAM usage statistics, network and disk usage statistics, also information relevant to your disk I/O, throughput, etc.
  • Some DBaaS services also provide you with the query statistics relevant to your database cluster.
  • Some DBaaS services let you add or remove databases or users in the database cluster.
  • Decent DBaaS services will also provide you with the ability to back up your data should you so desire.
  • Of course, DBaaS settings should take care of high availability too: that’s the case with Severalnines’ CCX: with every database instance that is deployed, a database-aware proxy is deployed (ProxySQL) providing connection pooling, failover, query routing, query rules, a database firewall, and many other features.

However, what we’re most interested in for the purposes of this blog post, are the use cases of database-as-a-service solutions in the tech industry.

DBaaS Use Cases in Tech

The tech sector, obviously, uses databases very heavily. Some of the use cases where database-as-a-service solutions might be useful to the tech sector include:

• Hosting service providers: since DBaaS solutions are generally scalable, using a DBaaS platform to handle at least some of the backend infrastructure and operations can be very useful to hosting providers. Hosting providers, in this case, could also make use of, for example, ProxySQL to distribute load between nodes, to enable connection pooling and failover, query routing, and deploy advanced features like query rules and a database firewall.
• Lack of expertise by developers: if the software developers your company hires lack the expertise about databases, DBaaS could be very useful. In that scenario, DBaaS could take the hassle off of your developers’ hands: they will no longer have to worry about query performance, monitoring of databases, taking or restoring database backups: everything will be accomplished for them!
• If you think that your business might benefit from short-lived databases, DBaaS could also be very useful. Since most DBaaS solutions let us rapidly provision databases, also scale them back and forth, DBaaS solutions might be a goldmine.
• If you find your developers wondering about disaster recovery or high availability, DBaaS might also be very useful since most decent DBaaS solutions can take care of those two things for us: CCX developed by Severalnines, for example, can ensure that your databases stay highly available by making them use ProxySQL together with your MySQL and MariaDB clusters. ProxySQL should provide you with connection pooling and failover, query routing, also it has some other features like query rules and database firewall.
• Since most database-as-a-service solutions (like the one provided by Severalnines) also allow you to add and modify database users or databases themselves, they can also be a useful tool in your shed if your software developers are not very SQL-savvy after all: use a DBaaS and you will be able to add users, crease schemas, grant permissions, and track the activity of your users. Benefits all around!

Summary

The tech industry isn’t just like other industries that might make use of database-as-a-service solutions. DBaaS solutions can be extremely useful to the tech industry because in most cases, they provide just what developers, DevOps engineers, hosting experts, and other people desire: they can deploy load balancers, take care of database monitoring, query statistics,  it can let you add users to your databases or databases themselves, they can show the status of your backups (when they were created, what’s their recurrence, what’s their method, status, type, etc.), they can even help you deploy a firewall on top of your database clusters making them useful to everyone: developers, database administrators, hosting experts, security engineers, DevOps people and other tech industry professionals alike. If you like the features offered by DBaaS providers, we think that CCX can provide you with all of them and even more: be sure to try it out today and tell us what you think.