CCX for Technology Directors: What do You Need to Know?

Database-as-a-service solutions, at least as we know them, are shaking the market right now. However, before implementing one of such solutions into your company, you might wonder: why should I do it? What’s the benefit? Why are other companies doing it? Is it beneficial for me as a technology director? How better is life going to be for the employees of the business? etc.

Why DBaaS?

You see, databases, especially these days, are under constant “stress” – they are constantly being used by hundreds, thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of users; as the workload set upon database solution increases, the need for specialized database-as-a-service solutions might become more and more apparent. Companies usually turn to DBaaS for one or more of the following reasons:

• They want to get a deeper overview of the database nodes they use.
• They want to automate the monitoring of services that are being used, they would want to observe query statistics under load, and normally, they might want to add a user or a database to their database instance as well.
• They might want to automate the process of backups being taken: maybe backing up data consumes a lot of their time?
• Overall, they might just want to work with settings inside of their database instances through a nice UI!

By now you should have gotten a pretty good idea about why DBaaS services need to be used. Database-as-a-service solutions, generally, would be useful for a bunch of people including developers, of course, database administrators, data scientists, and, if you can’t tell by the title of this blog, technology directors.

What DBaaS?

Now that you know who DBaaS services might be useful for, you might want to decide what database-as-a-service solution you are going to use. After all, there must be so many database-as-a-service solutions available for you to choose from, right? Indeed, there are quite a few, but we are going to focus on CCX by Severalnines.

CCX helps you maintain fully managed, clustered databases with high availability in mind – some of the key features it’s able to deliver on include operation automation, automatic traffic control (CCX will deploy load balancers to help you out in this regard), and, of course, high availability. What’s a database without it?

CCX will deploy ProxySQL by default for every MySQL and MariaDB cluster you have setup in the instance; it will also provide you with a very nice overview of all of the services you have available in your cluster:

Here you will be also able to see some general information including whether the database node is available or not, what version is it running, what’s its topology, and associated tags, etc. CCX will also provide some general information in the overview section. However, if you’d like to dig deeper into it, especially if you are a tech director, you might want to ensure that all of the services that are being used cover your company needs completely. For that, you have the services section:

This section will, of course, display any information related to database services, their status, their roles, and their connection information. If you’re a database-savvy tech director though, you should be able to get a very good overview of your services in the monitoring section as well:

This section will provide you with three possible character sets each depicting different characteristics of your database instances – system will give you all of the information relevant to monitor your system performance, database nodes will dive deeper into database nodes, and the load balancer chart set will, of course, provide you with some information about load balancers.

If you’re a tech director, you also might want to ensure that all of the database users that are in use are actually necessary and if not, add them – no issues here either. Simply provide a username, a password, and a database name, toggle a switch if you want to create an admin user, and you are done:

In general, CCX by Severalnines should be very useful for technology directors because as technology moves forward, more and more load is getting loaded onto your databases. Your databases are an absolutely crucial aspect of your business, aren’t they? So they must be looked after properly. With CCX you can’t go wrong – keep in mind that CCX is developed by world’s leading database experts, so you are always in good hands, so what are you waiting for? Try CCX today and tell us what you think.