7 Reasons you should consider DBaaS on Azure

By Patrik Bihammar

I am often surprised to find many organizations are still running their databases in a VM, even after moving to the cloud, instead of leveraging on DBaaS.

To quote Apurva Mankad from WebXpress Transportation Software, who has experienced the benefits of DBaaS first hand: “We have 99.99{1f0cc4060f4fe9fc982bbd4bbe2778698630254e28c6e7cd32c637f8f4aaee17} uptime, real time backup and auto-indexing. Our maintenance has reduced by over 90{1f0cc4060f4fe9fc982bbd4bbe2778698630254e28c6e7cd32c637f8f4aaee17} and peace of mind gone up by 900{1f0cc4060f4fe9fc982bbd4bbe2778698630254e28c6e7cd32c637f8f4aaee17} !! “

In short, DBaaS allows you to free up time you are currently investing on database administration and maintenance, and focus on your application and innovation instead of your operations.

Whilst you might still associate Microsoft primarily with SQL Server. Microsoft Azure offers the most comprehensive and enterprise-grade range of DBaaS offerings, regardless if your database of choice is SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Cassandra etc. Sure, you can still run your DBs in an Azure VM, but why would you?

dbaas

Here is a more elaborate view on why you should really consider the DBaaS option:

  1. Scale and agility. One of the key benefits of DBaaS is that you can right size your workloads for your current needs and then scale up (or down) as your requirements change over time. Speaking of scale, Azure PostgreSQL Hyperscale offers industry leading scalability. In short, you don’t need to overprovision your hardware on day 1 “just in case”.
  2. Automated operations and maintenance. This is the main point I touched on above. Whilst there are still operational and maintenance aspects that you need to consider, they are significantly reduced through automation e.g. patching, version updates etc. are significantly simplified and automated. In short, your DB operations and maintenance work will be significantly reduced. So you can do something more impactful.
  3. Monitoring built-in. The Azure DBaaS services offer built in query performance insights, performance monitoring, alerts and recommendations. You can leverage these alerts together with other Azure Services (e.g. Azure Functions) or 3rd party services (e.g. ServiceNow, Datadog), to trigger an action e.g. scale up/down, raise a ticket etc. In short, the DBaaS platform will monitor, alert and even recommend how you can tune your DB performance.
  4. High Availability built-in. Setting up HA in the on-premise world can be a major undertaking. In Azure, HA is built-in and Microsoft provides financially backed service level agreement (SLA) usually 99.99{1f0cc4060f4fe9fc982bbd4bbe2778698630254e28c6e7cd32c637f8f4aaee17}. Should a failure occur, our DBaaS offerings can quickly recover automatically, minimizing any application down time. In short, the effort involved in designing for high availability, redundancy, and resiliency is built into the DBaaS platform with minimal work required from you.

1620899493023

7. Ease of integration. No matter how much you love database flavor x, y or z, no database is an island or exists in isolation. Hence, the final benefit I want to touch on is the ease in which our DBaaS offerings integrate with our rich set of other cloud native Azure solutions to serve your end-to-end solution requirements. e.g. Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure AI and Machine Learning etc.

1620890267567

If you are convinced on the benefits and you’re ready to migrate to DBaaS, here are some great Database migration resources to get you going!

If you want to find out more about how our customers are benefiting from using our OSS and NoSQL DBaaS offerings, check out my other article: 4 reasons Azure is a great DBaaS platform for MySQL/PostgreSQL/NoSQL and this webinar on the benefits of OSS and NoSQL DBaaS for Developers.

I hope you found this perspective useful. Please do share yours! And don’t hesitate to reach out if you want to discuss your DBaaS migration or greenfield project!