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Why databases are moving to the cloud

Flexibility

Article from ADMIN 73/2023

By Gregor Bauer

Demand for cloud databases continues to increase, not only because of better scalability and availability, but because of lower investment and operating costs. We'll look at some of the limitations.

Opinions are divided into two major camps as to what constitutes a cloud database. The first camp claims they are databases provided by hyperscalers such as Amazon, Azure, and Google under the database as a service (DBaaS) model. The other, more common, view is that they can be any database that someone deploys within any cloud infrastructure, whether it be a private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, multicloud, or hosted DBaaS. It's just a matter of where the data is stored and how it is accessed. In the case of on-premises databases, access is over the corporate network (and VPN, if necessary) to internal database servers, whereas cloud databases will rely on Internet connections to external (in some cases internal) cloud servers.

Deployment Models

Generally speaking, cloud databases have three popular deployment models. In the first case, the cloud database is operated in-house, either in the company's own data cloud or a public cloud. In the second case, a hoster provides DBaaS. The third variant involves consuming the database as a managed service.

In the first scenario, the cloud database runs on an internal or external virtual machine (VM), but operations are handled by the company's own database administrators. In contrast, DBaaS involves the hoster or provider provisioning the database and hardware infrastructure as part of a subscription agreement, depending on the service level agreement (SLA). You are still responsible for ongoing operation of the database, though. If you want the provider to handle database operations, taking the load off the internal IT administrator's shoulders, the third option is a database as a managed service, or managed hosting.

The deployment model has no influence on the database type. Both relational SQL and document-oriented NoSQL databases can be operated as cloud databases. The different levels of flexibility make an important difference,

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