The rapidly growing adoption of cloud database services demonstrates how the platform can satisfy the needs of a variety of different users and workloads. Postgres is the leading enterprise-class open source alternative to proprietary relational database products, both on-premise and in the cloud. Advances over the past three years have added powerful new features and capabilities for evolving data challenges.
So how does a cloud database support a wide range of users and workloads? Answering this question requires identifying the stakeholders making demands on the cloud database. In addition to the challenges inherent to their roles, each of the following end users is also under pressure to leverage technology more strategically.
In other words, these stakeholders need to choose technology that gets the job done better, faster and cheaper.
Database Administrators/Architects
Database administrators and architects must field increasing demand for access to, and insight into, organizational data. But they are often locked into sky-high license and maintenance contracts with a traditional proprietary software vendor with little to no budget for expanding an already overly complex data infrastructure.
Having access to a cloud database means:
- Instant resources to support overflow and short-term initiatives such as application upgrades, apps with special requirements or data transformation initiatives.
- Greater reliability, greater performance and the most recent software features, something many organizations can’t offer in-house.
- The ability to set up a global database with cross-availability zone failover and high availability in less than a day for a fraction of the cost of building out or arranging for physical resources.
Application Developers
Application developers work under great scrutiny from multiple business units who have joined the DevOps movement and now must deliver better-performing applications on increasingly shorter development times. However, they are often still dependent on IT staff to set up necessary build environments.
Automatic horizontal read scale-out of database clusters, support for unstructured and semi-structured data types with JSON/JSONB for document data and HStore for key/value pairs, ability to combine data of multiple types from different databases and normalize it within the relational framework and query it with SQL, and many other benefits have caused application developers to flock to cloud-based applications, and the database is no exception.
Small operations have tapped cloud databases because of their low cost and agility. Dev teams at larger companies, however, have moved to cloud databases because of internal operational pressures. They can’t afford to wait for IT to build out dev/test environments.
IT Managers
IT managers can lose control of the computing resources used within the enterprise as developers end-run IT by choosing their own solutions, including cloud databases, with little regard for enterprise standards or long-term downstream effects on application performance.
For the enterprise, moving application development teams onto a cloud database relieves multiple pain points:
- Development teams can move faster because IT can provision cloud resources faster than setting up new on-premise environments.
- By controlling access to the cloud database resource, as with other cloud resources, IT can standardize and monitor access to the database component of development environments.
Choosing a cloud database with predictable performance both in the cloud and on-premise, automatic horizontal read scale-out of database clusters, subscription-based pricing for greater budget predictability, support for schema and schema-less data within a single environment, and many other benefits can ensure IT managers sleep better at night.
Web 2.0 Company Architects
Web 2.0 architects are tasked with launching new technology endeavors with the latest in web-based tools and solutions, some of which may not align with in-house skills, They’re trying to address what are essentially nuts-and-bolts issue while also having to focus on go-to-market strategy and company growth objectives. Web 2.0 company architects need to pull together cloud-based resources that perform and scale to meet indeterminate demand for new endeavors. They need easy-to-use solutions that can function with little or no oversight because some lack the bandwidth for constant monitoring or the in-house skills required for these scalable setups.
Some need pre-configured solutions that can function to meet a baseline threshold right off the bat. Still others, however, need or want root access to the underlying parameters for configuration and tuning to meet very specific needs.
Postgres Plus Cloud Database has attracted a large contingent of Web 2.0 companies that operate all or in great part in the cloud. They are especially drawn by the access it gives them to a low-cost, high-performance enterprise-class relational database on par with costly traditional databases. The same features that appeal to other stakeholders appeal to this population too.
Let EnterpriseDB help you start leveraging the many benefits of the cloud. Please visit our site for more information on how PPCD can help your organization incorporate a cloud database into its infrastructure, or contact us for more information.
Fred Dalrymple is Product Manager, Postgres Plus Cloud Database at EnterpriseDB.