2 min

MariaDB, a provider of open source data management solutions, has now brought its on-premise product to the cloud. With SkySQL, companies say they get a powerful DataBase-as-Service (DBaaS) solution that meets the highest demands.

With the move to the cloud, the open source data management solution provider is now expanding its portfolio completely. MariaDB was originally a mainly business on-premise engine that – as an open-source engine – should form a cheaper licensing and management alternative for the products of Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, among others.

Gradually, the supplier is also adopting a more cloud-focused strategy. The company already delivers its MariaDB data management product as a managed service that can run on customers’ cloud-based infrastructure. It also recently added a lot of functionality for hybrid processing for transactions and analytics.

Public cloud through Kubernetes

It goes without saying that the next step is to launch a true cloud-based service. SkySQL is based on the container orchestration platform Kubernetes. According to the vendor, this should give customers the freedom to purchase the service as DBaaS from any large (multIi)cloud environment.

MariaDB sees this as the best strategy for hybrid and public cloud, so that end users can not only choose the cloud from which they purchase the service, but also have the ability to roll out the data management service to multiple cloud environments.

Functionality

SkySQL comes with a lot of extra functionality, according to the vendor. Especially for storage. The service is based on the latest version of its Enterprise Server and supports, among other things, multi-zone failover, self-healing recovery, read load balancing, transparent read/write splitting, IP whitelisting and full encryption.

The cloud version also offers row, column and combined row/column storage. This is a technique that makes it possible to combine transactional and analytical processing on the same data set. This makes so-called ‘smart transactions’ that combine both types of processing to support complex queries.

Not entirely cloud-native

MariaDB admits that the cloud service is not entirely cloud-native. According to the vendors, SkySQL is a data management service optimised with a cloud-native storage architecture. The DBaaS service stores transactional data as block storage and analytical data as object data when deployed. Customers can automatically replicate from block to object storage in seconds.

In addition, SkySQL comes with a remote database management team that takes care of provisioning, scaling and management for clients.

Availability

The service is initially available via Google Cloud Platform. Deployment to AWS and Microsoft Azure is scheduled for later this year.