Percona takes on cloud giants with open source DBaaS

Percona takes on cloud giants with open source DBaaS

Percona is offering a preview of an open source Database as a Service (DBaaS) platform as an alternative to commercial products – and the company is also claiming that its Percona Kubernetes Operators make it possible to configure a database once, and deploy it anywhere.

Announced at the annual Percona Live event, the DBaaS supports Percona’s open source versions of MySQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL and is intended to compete with public cloud and commercial database vendor services.

For developers, this means having access to the flexibility of a DBaaS without being locked into any particular cloud provider or database vendor, and will enable users to maintain control of their data, according to Percona. As an on-demand self-service option it also provides users with a convenient and simple way to deploy databases quickly.

The future of databases is in the cloud, Percona chief executive Peter Zaitse said in a statement, but added: “We’re taking this one step further by enabling open source databases to be deployed wherever the customer wants them to run – on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment.”

Critical database management operations in Percona’s DBaaS, such as backup, recovery, and patching, will be managed through a Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) component. This is also completely open source and is said to provide enhanced automation with monitoring and alerting to find and prevent issues that may affect database performance.

Percona has also released new and updated Kubernetes Operators, which it claims make it is possible to configure a Percona database once, and deploy it anywhere. These Operators streamline the process of creating a database, as well as ongoing lifecycle management.

The new Kubernetes Operator for PostgreSQL is currently available as a technical preview, while capabilities have been added to the Kubernetes Operator for MongoDB to support enterprise mission-critical deployments. This includes support for multiple shards for horizontal database scaling across multiple MongoDB Pods, plus Point-in-Time Recovery, which enables users to roll back the cluster to a specific transaction and time.

Customer trials of Percona DBaaS will start this summer, and users interested in participating can register on the Percona site.