Today our Database as a Service (DBaaS) offering has reached General Availability. With this achievement, we continue to improve our service offering and enable users to fully benefit from all features of DBaaS on the Exoscale platform.
DBaaS General Availability
Only two months after our initial preview launch in early July, we are now able to announce general availability for our DBaaS offering. This means for our service:
- SLAs on DBaaS are now fully enforced
- Support is fully active
- Billing starts
- CLI and API interfaces are available
We currently offer PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka and Caching as managed database offerings. Additional offerings will be added within the next months to come. The complete DBaaS documentation is available in our community resources.
We already also provide a beta version for Terraform support in the Exoscale Terraform Provider. Teams developing cloud native applications can already start to automate deployments of DBaaS in combination with SKS by using Terraform. Get insights on how automation can be possible with this example Terraform manifest from our latest webinar.
Data Protection & Features of Exoscale DBaaS
Our DBaaS comes with a rich set of features. With security as one of our core values, we are highly focused on offering a service that ensures high protection standards for your data and databases.
Security, high availability and backup and disaster recovery are the core aspects to ensure that data is protected at all times.
Security
All Exoscale DBaaS offerings come with encryption at rest and in-transit also. For the in-transit encryption three steps are possible. First, a TLS connection is mandatory to be used for all connections. Plaintext connections are therefore not possible for clients. This ensures that data is protected during transit. Second, within your firewall configurations users can specifically allow traffic from selected IP addresses or CIDR ranges. Last, it is possible to use a TLS client certificate and user/password options depending on the used service.
All data is also fully encrypted at rest, volumes are encrypted by LUKS. Furthermore, in the case of multi-node services, all traffic between cluster nodes is encrypted by the use of VPN or IPSec tunnels.
High Availability
Depending on the used managed database slight variations occur in the service plans. For the Managed PostgreSQL and Exoscale for Caching database offerings, depending on the chosen plan the backup frequency and retention vary. Startup plans do not offer any standby nodes, backup frequency is hence limited. For Business and Premium plans standby nodes are available.
Service plans for the Managed Apache Kafka databases all include multi-node clusters to provide high availability. Startup and Business plans include three nodes, plans only vary by storage and compute resources. For the Premium offering, 6, 9, 15 and 30 node plans are also available. This horizontal scalability allows for an even better performance and resilience.
The Exoscale DBaaS powered by Aiven management software continuously monitors all nodes. In case a failed node is detected, it automatically creates a replacement and syncs the data from the active (primary) node. In case of a failed active node, the standby node is changed to an active node and a new standby node is created.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
Reduce the risk of data loss and downtimes with the Exoscale DBaaS offering. Daily Backups are included in most DBaaS service plans. Furthermore, Snapshots or transaction logs are done automatically and used for point-in-time recovery. For PostgreSQL and Caching managed database plans, database forking is the process involved when considering restoring a backup or PITR. Forking a service is possible in the same zone or also in another zone than the original location.
For Managed Apache Kafka, the MirrorMaker 2 is to be used to enable geo-replication.
Learn all about the security features and data protection measures in our webinar about Data Protection in DBaaS Environments:
Outlook
As announced in our last webinar, we will add a Managed MySQL database offering to our DBaaS stack within the upcoming weeks. Further additions will be released over the next months. Also, a fully featured web portal interface will be available within due time.
In case you have any questions on our DBaaS service please contact our sales team.