Comparing CCX with Amazon DynamoDB

If you are a developer or a database administrator, you have probably heard of database-as-a-service, in other words, DBaaS, solutions. Such solutions help us manage complex clustered database environments easily, efficiently, and effortlessly. In this blog post, we will compare two popular database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solutions – CCX by Severalnines and DynamoDB by Amazon.

Why DynamoDB?

DynamoDB is a tool developed by Amazon. It’s known for being a, as Amazon themselves puts it, “A flexible and fast, scalable NoSQL service” and the tool does precisely that: it’s a key-value database that is able to deliver very quick performance, no matter how it’s scaled. DynamoDB can be used together with web applications, mobile backends, or microservices.

Amazon’s DynamoDB has a bunch of use cases ranging from use cases in advertising to the gaming and banking industries: for example, it can be used to deliver low latency if that’s important to a business, to deliver automation and managed services to minimize operational costs time and money-wise, it can also be used as a data store for storing any marketing-related data, such as what links did the user click on to complete a certain task, etc. Gaming industry also has a use out of DynamoDB – gaming companies are using DynamoDB to store various kinds of data too: data can range from player data and, for example, player leaderboards for a certain game to session history data (source: Amazon DynamoDB)

How does CCX Compare?

CCX by Severalnines is similar to DynamoDB by Amazon in the sense that it’s also a fast and a scalable service. CCX is a database-as-a-service solution built on top of the power of ClusterControl takes care of everything: when CCX is in use you are able to deploy fully managed, load balanced, highly available database clusters in just a few clicks. CCX can offer a few core benefits for your business and for your databases:

• CCX by Severalnines is like a virtual database administrator, just that the DBA that CCX provides doesn’t work just 8 hours a day: it works 24/7. Isn’t that amazing? CCX is a virtual database administrator that ensures your database clusters are operating well, are always available, and their data is safe.
• Want to have load balancers together with your database-as-a-service solution? CCX by Severalnines can offer that, too! CCX gives you full control over your database queries too: you can route them on-demand, optimize the handling of connections, enable throttling, and more. CCX also has the ability to cache queries, meaning that your applications will perform even faster than expected! Excited yet?
• No database-as-a-service solution would be called a DBaaS without high availability, right? CCX provides that too, by default – it can offer highly available deployments for both MariaDB and MySQL using multi-master Galera clustering with features including multiple writable masters, consistent data across multiple servers, seamless scaling, and failover.

For example, deploy a data store in CCX and you will be able to instantly see when it was deployed, whether it is available or not (its status – whether it’s down or not), what database cluster solution does it use, on how many nodes does it run on, what’s its cloud provider, and where it’s situated as well (in this case, the data store is in the North of Europe), you will also be able to see the amount of queries per second as well as get some further details or delete the data store altogether:

Click on the data store (get into the Details section) and you will be able to see a whole new world related to databases:

In the overview you are able to see the state of your services, what your cloud provider is, some information about your database instance, and some other things.

Want to observe the status of your backups? Not a problem too! Click on the Backups link:

The settings page, for example, provides you with the name of your data store, you can select the time you desire for your database cluster to be maintained, provide the details for your load balancer in use, etc.

CCX has many other useful things too – you can set up firewall rules, you can even observe your backups:

Or work with your database users should you so desire:

CCX also has other features useful for both DBAs and developers alike, but in order to get to know all of them, you will have to try CCX out yourself – do so and tell us what you think!

Summary

Amazon DynamoDB can be useful in a wide variety of different scenarios ranging from advertising and gaming industries even extending to the banking industry. However, if you find yourself needing a virtual database administrator for cheap (keep in mind it works 24/7 and not 8 hours as well), give CCX a try! The Severalnines team has put a lot of effort into developing the tool, so that CCX solves your database-related issues in no-time.