Along with the meteoric rise of Kubernetes for stateless workloads, clients are looking at how to handle stateful applications deployed on Red Hat OpenShift or IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.

A majority of applications — all the way from your favorite music streaming application to some of the world’s most critical business applications that power your credit card transactions or stock market trades — have a need to store data in a database, whether application-generated or machine-generated. As these applications scale, grow, and see an increase in usage, running databases yourself can become increasingly burdensome and hard to manage. 

More and more, enterprises and developers are turning away from self-managing their own databases because of the challenges around provisioning, scaling, and keeping their data layer available for their applications. It can be extremely costly and time-consuming to manage and maintain your own database infrastructure, and you will likely need very specific teams who are knowledgeable about database technology, security, compliance, infrastructure, and networking. It can also be quite a headache worrying about keeping your database up, secure, and configured with best practices. This can take critical time away from running your business and focusing on the core value of your products or services.

IBM Cloud’s Database-as-a-Service offerings

Here is where IBM Cloud’s Database-as-a-Service offerings can help you and your business focus on your applications, innovation, and bringing your solutions to market more quickly. You can get started with a production-level database in just a few clicks or an API call. Gain confidence knowing your database is always available with 99.99% high availability across three availability zones in an IBM Cloud region. We provide simple, self-service offerings for the “born-in-the-garage startup” all the way up to enterprises that run mission critical infrastructure like airlines, banks, logistics and healthcare companies.

Depending on your use case and needs, IBM Cloud has a solution for your relational, non-relational, and highly sensitive and secure data. We make sure to vet the vast collection of databases out there and only provide you with the best-of-breed, enterprise-grade databases so you can spend time on what matters. We also focus on providing a select set of industry-leading open-source databases that allow you to be flexible with your application needs and to reduce vendor-lock in through high licensing costs. 

The database offerings are split into different categories based on your data model needs, use cases, and application needs. Here are a few popular ones:

• SAP, ERP’s, CRM’s: Relational databases to power systems of record like PostgreSQL or Enterprise DB.
• Web and mobile apps: NoSQL document databases to help scale your data needs to millions of users like MongoDB or Cloudant.
• Developer tools: Fit-for-purpose databases to help power cloud native distributed applications like Redis, Elasticsearch, or DataStax 

Limited-time promotional credit

To help you get started with building your application on IBM Cloud, here are a few limited-time promotional credit offers for a select set of databases on IBM Cloud. This offer is only valid for new IBM Cloud external clients or external clients with new workloads. All codes will expire after 90 days once activated unless the dollar value credit value is used up first:

1. Create an IBM Cloud Account (make sure it’s billable by entering your credit card info).
2. Navigate to the promotions tab within the IBM Cloud console.
3. Plug in the code and click apply! 
4. Get started using your database of choice based on the appropriate code

Interested? Take our databases for test drive with the promo codes below:

• EDBFREE1500 ($1,500 value, valid for the Enterprise Database service – all plans)
• DSEFREE1500 ($1,500 value, valid for the DataStax Database service – all plans)
• MONGOFREE1500 ($1,500 value, valid for only the Mongo DB Enterprise Plan)
• CLOUDANT_TXE_FREE ($600 value, valid for only the Cloudant Transaction Engine Plan)

Learn more about the IBM Cloud Database offerings.