Everything you need to know about our new databases services, IBM Cloud Databases.

Since the announcement of our decision to position IBM Compose databases behind our new services on IBM Cloud Databases Portfolio, we’ve received questions about this transition. Today we want to clarify our updated plan on how this transition will work for you. Below are the services that comprise the IBM Cloud Databases family:

• Databases for PostgreSQL
• Databases for Redis
• Databases Elasticsearch 
• Databases for etcd
• Databases for MongoDB 
• Messages for RabbitMQ

The power of open-source databases and Kubernetes

From a database portfolio point of view, we are believers in the power of open source databases to accelerate your app development, help avoid vendor lock-in, and scale innovation from the database community at large. As a member of the IBM Cloud, we’re also all-in on Kubernetes as a common building block for stateless and stateful services across hybrid, public, and private environments. Therefore, we decided to re-platform our Compose database services, leveraging the elasticity, fault tolerance, and economics of the IBM Cloud to deliver a new suite of databases services to meet our customers most demanding workloads.

If you would like to learn how we did that, you can read Ben Anderson’s blog on building the service with Kubernetes Operators.

We believe these new services will help you consume IBM Cloud resources faster with easy-to-buy, easy-to-deploy, and easy-to-scale services which deliver a higher level of flexibility and usability.

Note: At this point in time, the Compose services are still supported and have not yet been deprecated. We do recommend our clients begin assessing and acting on a transition from Compose to the analogous IBM Cloud Databases service. 

Key characteristics of IBM Cloud Databases

IBM Cloud Databases offerings have two key characteristics which distinguish them from IBM Compose and other cloud services for open-source databases:

1. Native integration with IBM Cloud, which provides a cohesive experience for customers that includes access control, encryption management, technical support, and billing.
2. Built with the power of the IBM Cloud stack:
   • IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services
   • IBM Cloud Internet Services 
   • IBM Cross-Regional Cloud Object Storage
   • High availability in Multi-Zone Regions (MZR) across two or three distinct data centers, depending on the database type 

Key features of IBM Cloud Databases offerings

The new offerings are packed with features, including the following: 

• Integration with:
  • IBM Cloud Identity and Access Manager (IAM) and Resource Controller
  • IBM Cloud Activity Tracker for audit logging of database lifecycle events
  • IBM Cloud Log Analysis with LogDNA for real-time or historical log analysis 
  • IBM Cloud Monitoring for observing disk and RAM usage
  • IBM Cloud Service Endpoints for connecting to your database over the private IBM Cloud network 
  • IBM Cloud Key Protect for “Bring Your Own Key” disk encryption 
• An IBM Cloud CLI plugin through the IBM Cloud and a REST API for automation 
• Serverless scaling of Disk and RAM to provide finer granularity over spend
• Cross-regional read replicas for Databases for PostgreSQL for read scale out and disaster recovery 

If these features pique your interest, here are some migration guides to help you get going:

• PostgreSQL
• Elasticsearch 

Below is a comparison matrix to help map the differences. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to drop us line through IBM Cloud support. We are happy to help.

IBM Cloud Databases offerings and IBM Compose: At-a-glance comparison