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Amid Uncertainty, Four Ways Databases Will Offer Market Sustainability in the New Year
By
Patrick Bossman, Product Manager, MariaDB
In a world that increasingly feels like it's holding on for dear life-businesses are
trying to hold on to profit and key talent, governments trying to hold on to
peace, individuals trying to hold on to a sense of normalcy in a turbulent
time-certain technologies offer us foundational strength and sustainability.
It's databases that ground us and carry us
forward. Databases back just about every kind of organization and have been
rapidly evolving to meet the needs of today and tomorrow, abstracted across
clouds and delivering high availability, scalability, and efficiency. Here are
four ongoing trends that business and technology leaders can use to guide
strategy and help bring certainty to their organizational success in tough
times.
Abstracting
away the complexity of hyperscalers puts business first
The "hyperscalers" like AWS, Microsoft,
Google, Oracle, IBM, Meta, Alibaba and others have long been abstracting
infrastructure hardware into cloud services, offering a utility-style computing
model to external and internal customers. But diving into some of these cloud
services dashboards, APIs or CLIs surfaces their complexities and
inefficiencies. The difficulty of using database services in the cloud is being
answered with the next powerful layer of abstraction: DBaaS that bridges
multiple clouds and hybrid deployments, making sure that data across an
organization can be leveraged in the fastest and most efficient manner
possible. What's key is that this kind of scaling of the hyperscalers offers
abstraction that's easier to use. That ease helps bridge skills gaps plaguing
the market and gives those in the trenches the tools they need to put business
objectives first.
Businesses
will increasingly turn to distributed SQL for high availability, reduced vendor lock-in
Many enterprises and SMBs, as customers of the
hyperscalers, have been exposed to repeated, region-sized outages. They're
seeing that they can be vulnerable if they're reliant on just one cloud.
They're placing a greater emphasis on reliability, on developing strategies
that will help them not just survive major outages, but be more immune from
impact. They're turning to systems that can go multi-cloud and will insulate
them from the exposure risks of a single cloud provider.
That means deploying a cohesive database as a
service that can be installed and run across multiple clouds in a single
cluster and using distributed SQL as a way of ensuring high availability.
Distributed SQL has reached a point of maturity. Companies that have been
resistant to moving off their legacy systems are now seeing successful migrations
in the marketplace. We'll see larger enterprises operationalize a distributed
SQL, multi-cloud approach, with other organizations following suit. As data
volumes and the number of AI-driven applications that leverage those volumes
continue to skyrocket, a DBaaS that easily enables organizations to spread
their database across multiple clouds and remain highly available will be a key
differentiating factor in a tough economy-while those locked in to single
vendors experience service interruptions.
On top of availability issues, costs can
easily soar when you're trapped into a contract with one provider and not
diversifying resources for efficiency.
All
companies need to have a "seasonal mentality"-with robust scale-in, scale-out
to reduce costs
Business is becoming more seasonal in terms of
the need for compute and database resources. While retailers, for example, will
still plan for Black Friday, the unexpected need to rapidly scale out at any
given time in the year, if a popular influencer mentions your product, or scale
in, if recession hits, is quite real and imperative for the bottom line. Some
organizations with tight budgets experience feast-or-famine type of situations,
like educational institutions whose needs spike when school starts and taper
during Spring Break. Behavior patterns, consumerism and buying cycles are
changing long-term and being influenced by all kinds of new social forces,
technologies and global conditions. Viral moments will become more common, and
those require instantaneous, one-click scaling or easy-to-manage auto-scaling
that can see the need and respond without human intervention. Businesses need
systems that will detect when workloads are going beyond a certain capacity
threshold and will just automatically add new nodes.
Where, previously, customers had to buy to
peak and tried to find alternate uses for the additional capacity lying around,
now they're not wasting money on something they don't really need. On the flip
side, if the viral moment hits, people cannot see a 404 on your website. The
ability to scale out immediately is an existential matter for applications
built today. Extremely fast scaling is a superpower-and a cost-savings
necessity-for customers this year and into the foreseeable future.
Additionally, part of modern elasticity with
databases is being able to deploy a distributed SQL service that automatically
decides what data to move where, across nodes and clouds, and routes
transactions smartly. If you are going to build an application or launch a
product, like some internet-connected device that has some management and
configuration associated with it, how do you put that in the marketplace and not put it on distributed SQL with
scale-out capability? You must in order for an interconnected application to be
successful. Rightsizing your stack for applications is crucial to increased
earnings and cost savings as well.
Investment
in customer experience will surge, with no reduction in core-value innovation
Contrary to suggestions that innovation will
decline as economic uncertainty continues, we'll actually see an investment in
innovation that makes the customer experience better, not a roll back. In a
challenging environment, there is more competition for people's limited
dollars. Businesses will become deeply focused on what their core value in the
market is and how to best deliver that value to their customers as seamlessly
as possible.
Companies will continue their digital
transformations and put themselves on data platforms that allow them to meet
customer demands swiftly. While they're rewriting their applications with core
needs in mind, it's the perfect time to reassess their stack and tune it for
scalability and availability as their business requirements change.
Being mindful of the ways database
abstraction, higher availability, on-demand scalability and customer-centric
innovation across cloud environments improve efficiency will help businesses
achieve market sustainability in a turbulent and, at times, unpredictable
world.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Bossman has almost 30 years of
experience with relational databases, initially as an application developer,
DBA, and query tuner, then as a query optimizer developer, and database tooling
solution architect. Patrick relies on his experience in his current role as
MariaDB Xpand Product Manager to work with customers as well as MariaDB development, support, marketing, and
sales to facilitate the development, delivery, and support of MariaDB Xpand.