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Navigating the Evolving Landscape of Cloud Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) in 2024

By Aleksandra Mitroshkina, Senior Manager, Product Marketing, Percona

With 2024 fast approaching, organizations stand at the crossroads of a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) revolution. Reflecting on the trajectory of this technology thus far reveals a landscape shaped by a persistent concern for costs, inflexibility issues, and fears of vendor lock-in.

In the coming year these challenges will take center stage, compelling teams to proactively address these issues or be left behind in the race to innovate. This article will delve into some of the trends that will influence the strategies and decisions of DBaaS users and administrators in the coming year, urging teams to proactively address issues related to cost management, flexibility, vendor lock-in, and the evolving roles of developers and infrastructure administrators.

Short-term cost increases will cause long-term spending spirals unless teams make changes

The biggest concern for cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS) users is the one that's always been there - cost at scale. Paying strictly for what you consume allows users to keep costs down and avoid waste, but it also requires an understanding of how your application behaves and how users interact with it. Unpredictable spikes in workload, especially those that the application should have been more efficient with, can be very costly. You're paying for what you use, but you may not always use what was calculated for.

Cloud DBaaS can scale up easily, which is a great advantage for the business, but this scale-up can easily get out of control. In 2024, more teams will have to guard against these spikes in costs by spending time to tune their underlying infrastructure, so they can break this cycle and cut their bills significantly.

There will be growing demand for DBaaS flexibility

Lack of database configuration flexibility is a growing challenge to the DBaaS users. Currently, database provisioning in cloud DBaaS has a cookie-cutter approach that only allows its users to go "off-script" with database configuration in a very limited way. While such an approach helps promote standardization of database deployments, we see many companies that chose DBaaS to make their developers more productive but they are now coming up against the restrictions that are in place.

In 2024, teams will want more flexibility in database configuration, while still keeping the concept of standardization and reasonable resource utilization intact. This will force DBaaS providers to loosen up their restrictions and help their customers get what they want, not what the DBaaS company wants to provide. We may also see some challenger alternatives to emerge on the market.

The first generations of DBaaS users will find their vendor lock-in limits

Many companies with a large database footprint are concerned about vendor lock-in but are hesitant to move away from DBaaS.  Whilst it is considered quick and easy to put data into a DBaaS, getting it out in order to use another provider or to move to a private cloud is a costly project that not many companies are willing to take.

It can be challenging to make internal changes, particularly at such a large scale. As a result, some organizations have focused on cost optimization without transitioning away from cloud DBaaS.

There are currently few alternatives to the cloud DBaaS that would check all the boxes for those companies. So while they are dissatisfied with what they have in place, they are finding it difficult to evaluate what they should do next.

In 2024, more companies will find they have this problem. In turn this will lead to a market opening up for more services and support to either help companies control their existing DBaaS deployments better, or to prepare and make the move to a different option that meets needs for the future.

Infrastructure administrators are more concerned about database deployments and DBaaS than developers

From numerous interviews with DBAs and other infrastructure administrators, it is frequently DBAs, SREs, and other infrastructure administrators that are more concerned about database deployments and DBaaS than developers. This is because it is their responsibility to keep the databases healthy and performing optimally, while developers want to achieve deployments and move to build new applications. While a team of software developers may not have the experience to handle or want to deal with the complexities of provisioning a database, they do rely on DBaaS as a tool to get their work done, such as application development.

How will this change in 2024? DevOps and developer teams will start to hit limits around how they work with data on new projects. They will start to appreciate the same problems that their DBA peers have talked about in the past. This will put more emphasis back on understanding the basics around databases, and skilling up enough to not encounter these kinds of problems in future.           

Conclusion:

As organizations seek to optimize their DBaaS deployments, the coming year will demand a strategic reassessment of infrastructure, a quest for greater control, and a keen exploration of open source alternatives, all set against the backdrop of a dynamic and ever-changing cloud computing landscape.

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