By Josh Mintz Jerry Tillman 4 min read
June 30, 2021

A distributed cloud provides consistent security and services across environments, centralized workload visibility, reduced latency, easier compliance and higher application development velocity.

Listen to the IBM Cloud Podcast as two experts discuss the intersection of cloud databases with distributed cloud environments. 

DBaaS (Database-as-a-Service) is a cloud computing offering that lets users access and use a cloud database system without installing their own software, handling patching or managing the distributed systems themselves (not to mention finding and hiring the high-priced talent required to run the myriad database technologies required by your business). Having the cloud provider take care of a host of database administration tasks (e.g., automatic high availability, backups, patching and encryption), thereby allowing engineering teams to spend more time building features and optimizing performance, rather than managing databases, is a compelling benefit. Until relatively recently, the capabilities of DBaaS were typically only available in a singular public cloud environment (such as IBM Cloud).

However, the advent of distributed cloud databases unlocks the value of DBaaS and makes these capabilities consistently available globally in locations like client-owned on-premises data centers, edge locations or third-party public cloud infrastructure. In this model, IBM maintains responsibility for the database software, set-up and product evolution, allowing your team to focus more on building applications while still meeting data residency, latency or high-availability requirements.

IBM Cloud Databases are now enabled by IBM Cloud Satellite for distributed cloud workloads 

We are proud to announce the general availability of the following: 

This means that IBM Cloud is offering the breadth of our databases on a customer’s IBM Cloud Satellite location to enable the adoption of cloud-native, open-source database technology with reduced effort, expense and time.

Powered by the distributed cloud model, IBM Cloud Databases enabled by IBM Cloud Satellite also grants clients the following:

  • Deployment of production-grade databases into customer’s account on other Cloud Service Providers, customer’s own data centers or in edge locations
  • Bring databases to where the application lives, resulting in reduced latency and networking charges
  • High-availability and secure architecture by default
  • Daily backups with retention of 30 days stored in IBM Cloud Cross-Region Object Storage
  • 24×7 monitoring and alert resolution by database domain experts
  • Online scaling with pay-as-you-go, hourly billing

The most data services in any distributed cloud

IBM is making available the most data services in any distributed cloud environment for IBM Cloud Satellite with the general availability of IBM Cloud Databases enabled by IBM Cloud Satellite. This will allow clients to scale databases across any environment with improved security and a consistent set of management capabilities for popular open-source data services:

  • PostgreSQL for transactional workloads, such as ledgers or customer relationship management systems 
  • Redis for application and database caching or as a web session store
  • RabbitMQ for message queuing between micro-services
  • etcd to hold and manage the critical information that distributed systems need to keep running

IBM Cloud Databases provides the benefits of SaaS globally

To achieve cost savings, improve development velocity and reduce vendor lock-in, business leaders want to use open-source databases delivered in a SaaS model in their organizations. Today, these organizations are constrained by a dearth of available database talent and the expense of operating many different databases in-house.

Let’s imagine an organization that wants to deploy credit-card applications in any location worldwide with zero rework for a database layer. Instead of building their own internal and bespoke Database-as-a-Service offering, they choose to use IBM Cloud Databases enabled by IBM Cloud Satellite, which provides the following:

  • Cost savings, as they don’t have to ramp up a team of subject matters experts for building, running and maintaining custom OpenShift operators for databases
  • Out-of-the-box best-practice security, resiliency and availability configuration for a variety of database types
  • Reclamation of time and resources with automated deployment to new markets and regions

IBM Cloud Databases delivers this by providing:

  • Common SaaS deployment models for high availability, backups and business continuity for popular open-source databases 
  • Universal UI, API, CLI for Databases as-a-Service on major Cloud Service Providers, edge locations and on-premises

Key concepts and components of IBM Cloud Satellite 

IBM Cloud Satellite extends IBM Cloud with the new concept of a “location.” Locations are infrastructure outside IBM Cloud where clients can run services and applications:

A location is supported by a group of Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts that provide capacity to run applications and IBM Cloud service instances. IBM Cloud Satellite supports the infrastructure that clients already have today. In addition, clients can choose to run their Satellite locations on integrated appliances or via IBM Cloud Satellite Infrastructure Service:

When these Satellite locations are instantiated, clients are seamlessly able to click to deploy IBM Cloud Databases onto those IBM Cloud Satellite locations to be provisioned and running in minutes with a highly available, secure, database-as-a-service running on your own infrastructure, the edge or in a third-party cloud.

Ready to deploy Top Rated database services anywhere?

IBM was named a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management System and has also recently earned Top Rated Awards from TrustRadius for the second year in a row.

For IBM Cloud Databases, we see testimonials on TrustRadius like the following:

  • “The ease of use in getting started and the ongoing low overhead of maintaining the product have been perfect. We haven’t had a moment of trouble since starting to use the service.“
  • “This wide range of databases offered is a key differentiator for us, as we needed to use multiple databases for different use cases. Instead of having to get a database from a different vendor, we can provision, manage, and develop with the same vendor (IBM) via a single interface, reducing the overhead for both operations and development.”

Learn more

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Categories

Announcements  |  Cloud  |  database  |  Open source  |  open-source  | 
Josh Mintz
Program Director
Jerry Tillman
Director, IBM Cloud Database Services

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