Choosing a DBaaS: Avoiding Vendor Lock-in

When using any database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solution it’s important to remember that we must avoid being locked in to a specific vendor. If you find yourself asking why, great! This blog post will answer that question.

Why Use a DBaaS?

Before answering this question, we must answer the question why one should use a DBaaS in the first place. You see, with the growth of data, companies might find themselves looking for a “virtual database administrator”: database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solutions might be used to accomplish such a feat. DBaaS solutions are generally fast, offer a bunch of features suitable for different industries (including tech, advertising, gaming, and even banking industries), they are scalable with flexible pricing too. While this might sound like a dream, it’s really not. It’s just important to realize what should you ask from a database-as-a-service provider and what it’s able to provide. We will dive into that now.

Avoiding Vendor Lock-in

There are some DBaaS solutions that offer to choose specific vendors you might want to use. We are talking about the cases when you might find yourself choosing a cloud or database vendor for your datastore (for example, you might be deciding whether to use MariaDB, Percona or MySQL solutions, perhaps choose Redis), you might be deciding what region you want to be your datastore to be located in (Europe? North? South? West? What country? Why? etc.) If your DBaaS solution doesn’t offer such features, you might find it difficult to scale, or your cloud related options will be simply pretty limited. Thankfully, CCX by Severalnines helps you to avoid locked-in to a specific vendor: you are able to choose what kind of a cloud provider you desire to use, you are able to choose its location, etc.

For example, here’s how the UI of CCX looks like when you first log into the service:

As you can see, CCX is able to provide you with the status of the datastore, cluster information, information regarding your cloud provider, even queries per second.

Digging Deeper Into CCX

While all those features are amazing, this isn’t everything that CCX can offer for you or your business – click on a data store you elect to use and you will be presented with a whole new world regarding the database monitoring space:

As you can see, CCX provides you with a bunch of information: you are able to get an overview of the services you use, see information relevant to your services, to monitoring, see your query statistics, even add or modify users, observe the statistics relevant to your backups, deploy a firewall rule to protect your data, or modify the settings of your data store:

It’s important to note that CCX also helps you avoid vendor lock-in meaning that you can deploy your data stores on multiple different cloud providers including, but not limited to AWS, safespring, or CityCloud.

CCX is built atop the powerful ClusterControl – CCX can take care of everything, including deploying MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Galera clusters, automate operations, provide you with traffic control (CCX is able to deploy database-aware load balancers to give you full control over your queries, cache them, make your applications more responsive, etc.), also offer high availability, but for that you will have to use CCX yourself – give it a try today and tell us what you think!