Managed databases, also called ‘database as a service’ (DBaaS), are cloud-based services where the provider takes care of database provisioning, scaling, maintenance, and optimization. This is in contrast to a self-managed database, where an organization’s IT or development team maintains responsibility for these tasks.
Database infrastructure is a pain point for many businesses. As nearly every employee interfaces with customer and organizational data, choosing and maintaining the right database for your application needs is critically important. And best maintenance practices are key to keeping your database consistently available and performing well.
Database management includes tasks that fall into three categories:
No matter where your database is located, it can be self-managed or fully managed.
Here’s what these options look like:
Databases can be migrated from a self-managed, on-premises deployment to a managed cloud service, typically in order to gain the scalability, agility, security, and cost efficiency of the cloud. Migration is typically done in one of two ways:
While the first database migration strategy is more efficient, the second can benefit organizations that are under time pressure to move to the cloud, perhaps because of the end of a data center lease.
As databases are crucial to business operations, they must provide adequate performance and strictly limited downtime.
With a self-managed database, your internal team is responsible for all management and maintenance tasks. It can be difficult to find database administrators with the right qualifications to maintain an enterprise-level database. This is particularly true for small to medium-sized businesses without deep IT resources, but can also impact larger businesses with large, complex database fleets.
Self-management requires a significant time investment—time which could otherwise be spent on differentiated activities such as application development, architectural design, and data analysis. Over time, database self-management incurs increased costs, over and above the opportunity cost taken away from innovation. And when maintenance tasks are performed manually, the chance of introducing errors increases, especially in routine tasks that are more reliably performed by automated systems.
Furthermore, scaling a self-managed database can be difficult and resource-intensive. For on-premises solutions, increases in compute, storage, or networking needs may require additional hardware resources. Depending on the type of database, increasing the transactional volume will require optimizations to maintain performance.
Some businesses rely on private cloud to automate database maintenance tasks. These tasks may include performing patches, assisting with provisioning, or assisting in recovery from a database failure (failover).
A cloud provider automates setup, maintenance, and optimization tasks even further as part of their fully managed service offering.
Increasingly, AI is becoming a key part of database automation. Machine learning and AI algorithms analyze your database usage patterns to detect performance and security anomalies, optimize queries, and tune performance.
A cloud-based, fully managed database helps you scale your growth while eliminating the day-to-day hassles of keeping the database running at its best. Some benefits include:
Ease of use
The provider of a managed database is responsible for all operational, maintenance, and administrative management tasks—relieving your team of these responsibilities.
High availability
Managed databases are constantly monitored and optimized for the best availability, typically with a service level agreement (SLA) as a guarantee.
Better scalability
Easily scale your database up when you need more capacity, without the need to purchase additional servers. In some cases, your database can be scaled automatically, based on application demand.
Increased security
Ensuring a database is fully secure is complex, requiring constant updates to protect against new threats. A major service provider has a larger team of security experts than most organizations can assemble on their own.
Lower operational costs
The cloud’s economies of scale generally result in lower operating costs, and the cloud provider relieves you from the burden of data center construction and maintenance.
More time for innovation
By spending less time on operational tasks, your IT team can focus more on innovating for your organization.
The first step is to choose the type of cloud database that’s right for your specific business purpose. The needs of your applications, the skills of your development team, and your data analytics and AI needs will help you determine the right database engine.
The next step is to select a provider that offers a fully managed service for the database engine that you’ve chosen. Research the provider’s track record with security, reliability, and experience in your industry. Make sure the provider can scale for your future growth, and ask if there are professional services offerings and financial incentives for migrating to their database services.
Cloud providers differ in their technological ability. Look for a provider that uses the latest advances in AI technology, both to power their database automation and to simplify your experience as a database developer and user.
Once you’ve selected a provider, look into your database migration options. Although migration takes time and money, the gains in efficiency, reliability, scalability, functionality, and security make it a worthwhile investment.
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