Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) is a relatively new trend in the enterprise that eliminates the need to manage physical or virtual database servers. For companies comfortable hosting their data in third-party data centers, DaaS offers tremendous incentives and a host of benefits that make it a high value proposition.

The concept is simple, rather than setup and manage database services on your own servers, vendors such as Amazon, GenieDB, and Heroku, commission database instances of your desired flavor (including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL), and take care of all the administrative functions associated with managing them, leaving you with the simpler tasks of configuring databases and connecting them to your applications.

With Database-as-a-Service, vendors take on the responsibilities of routine maintenance such as applying patches and updates to the databases, automatically backing up your entire databases per your desired backup retention policies, snapshots that enable rapid point-in-time recovery, and even managing geographically distributed failover servers and read/write replicas that provide high reliability and redundancy for mission-critical applications.

Like most other cloud infrastructure offerings, Database-as-a-Service generally comes priced in tiers that are tied to resource utilization which you can modify on-demand. This means that you won't pay for more than you need, and also means that you can easily scale resources up and down throughout the year based on your organizations needs.

There are some considerations to take in terms of selecting the right DaaS vendor, particularly in terms of assessing security risks for sensitive data, availability of support resources in case of emergencies, and organizations must also consider potential latency issues depending on the physical distance between application and database servers. Still, most of these issues should not be show-stoppers for organizations looking to migrate out of traditional self-managed database environments, which suggests that at least for the foreseeable future, Database-as-a-Service is here to stay.

To learn more about Database-as-a-Service and evaluate potential benefits and migration options, Contact Vexigen today!