Database-As-A-Service – Are You In The Cloud?

“To cloud or not to cloud” sounds kind of Shakespearean in tone and is a legitimate question every IT organization faces when looking to simplify operations and deliver services. But really, this is an old argument. Everything in the datacenter is being cloudified. The real question is whether to keep services and functions on-prem. Everything is moving to an “as-a-Service” (XaaS) model thanks to the simplicity and cost savings companies have seen through the public cloud. 

I think the way this XaaS evolution happens is pretty logical. The “killer apps” or low-hanging fruit is first to transition, and everything follows. And as the title of this article would imply, I think database services are a prime candidate for cloudification.

In the following few paragraphs, I will unpack this and show what companies like Nutanix are doing to compete in this DBaaS space.  And if you’re interested in digging a little deeper, click here for a research report on the topic. 

First, the setup – It’s a data(base) driven world

Data is the fuel that drives modern business. While this is a played-out statement, it’s more accurate than ever. Statista estimates that 2021 will see 74 zettabytes of data generated. And that number will grow to over 180 zettabytes by 2025.  

While this is an impressive number, there is a substantial downstream impact on IT organizations and, more precisely, database professionals that go unnoticed. These teams are being pushed beyond their limits. For a few reasons:

1.    The sheer proliferation of database and database instances being stood up across the average enterprise.  While exact quantification is difficult, it is fair to estimate the average number of active databases in the enterprise is in the hundreds. 

2.    The different database distributions are deployed across the enterprise. The database environment of your average enterprise is not a monolith. MySQL is a very popular database at the departmental level and is pushing enterprise-level capabilities. Oracle, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server dominate the enterprise segment for structured data management. These are four different database distributions with different control planes and management schedules (e.g., backup, patching, capacity planning, etc.).

3.    The rise of DevOps and somewhat disaggregated IT operations in the business unit has led to less regulated IT operations. Managing database operations from a fully centralized team and in a fully centralized environment is challenging. As businesses and business units progress along the digitization journey, database teams’ job becomes nearly impossible as database environments are spun more frequently and “managed” (or not) in a very siloed fashion. 

So that’s the setup. IT organizations need help managing database operations, and one viable option is the public cloud. It can deliver real savings in terms of cost, simplicity, and agility. But many organizations are a little less comfortable with the idea of all its data sitting in somebody else’s datacenter because of control and sovereignty issues. 

Nutanix thinks it has an answer with Era

Era is Nutanix’s response to this dilemma. It’s a database operations management platform built on its cloud platform. DBaaS delivered on prem. The value prop is pretty simple – centralize control over your database environment and deliver one-click simplicity for many of those jobs and tasks that cause database teams to order dinner at the office while working overtime. Think this sounds a little too good to be true?  It may be, but Nutanix backs this claim up with numbers from a sponsored study:

As a person who has spent time as an IT executive, these numbers jump off the page at me. They are exactly what I expect to see when I employ a public cloud service. 

From an operational perspective, I like the idea of having a single interface for my DBAs to access and perform database operations management.