What is a managed database service?

Database infrastructure is a pain point for many businesses. As nearly every employee interfaces with customer and organizational data, choosing and maintaining the right database for your application needs is critically important. And best maintenance practices are key to keeping your database consistently available and performing well.

Database management includes tasks that fall into three categories:

• Setup: Provisioning, configuring, and deploying the database
• Maintenance: Securing the database, creating backups, and performing updates and upgrades
• Optimization: Scaling the database, monitoring its health, and tuning it for optimal performance

No matter where your database is located, it can be self-managed or fully managed. 

Here’s what these options look like:

• On-premises, self-managed: If you’re self-managing on-premises, you rely on your internal team to complete all setup and maintenance tasks. You can provide better service to users by deploying private cloud DBaaS software, but all administrative responsibilities remain within your team. On-premises databases can be more difficult to protect, as they can’t rely on cloud-native monitoring technology and the deep security expertise of cloud vendors.
• Cloud database, self-managed: The database is installed and hosted on a virtual machine, which eliminates many infrastructure maintenance responsibilities. You maintain more control since your in-house team is responsible for database management.  
• Managed database service: The cloud database is accessed as a cloud service. The service provider, whether it’s the cloud platform vendor or an independent provider running on the platform, is responsible for hosting and all operational, maintenance, and administrative tasks. 

Databases can be migrated from a self-managed, on-premises deployment to a managed cloud service, typically in order to gain the scalability, agility, security, and cost efficiency of the cloud. Migration is typically done in one of two ways:

1. In one step, migrating your data directly from the source database to the managed database service
2. In two steps, first migrating your data to a self-managed database in the cloud and then moving within the cloud to the fully managed database

While the first database migration strategy is more efficient, the second can benefit organizations that are under time pressure to move to the cloud, perhaps because of the end of a data center lease. 

As databases are crucial to business operations, they must provide adequate performance and strictly limited downtime. 

With a self-managed database, your internal team is responsible for all management and maintenance tasks. It can be difficult to find database administrators with the right qualifications to maintain an enterprise-level database. This is particularly true for small to medium-sized businesses without deep IT resources, but can also impact larger businesses with large, complex database fleets.

Self-management requires a significant time investment—time which could otherwise be spent on differentiated activities such as application development, architectural design, and data analysis. Over time, database self-management incurs increased costs, over and above the opportunity cost taken away from innovation. And when maintenance tasks are performed manually, the chance of introducing errors increases, especially in routine tasks that are more reliably performed by automated systems.

Furthermore, scaling a self-managed database can be difficult and resource-intensive. For on-premises solutions, increases in compute, storage, or networking needs may require additional hardware resources. Depending on the type of database, increasing the transactional volume will require optimizations to maintain performance.

Some businesses rely on private cloud to automate database maintenance tasks. These tasks may include performing patches, assisting with provisioning, or assisting in recovery from a database failure (failover). 

A cloud provider automates setup, maintenance, and optimization tasks even further as part of their fully managed service offering. 

Increasingly, AI is becoming a key part of database automation. Machine learning and AI algorithms analyze your database usage patterns to detect performance and security anomalies, optimize queries, and tune performance. 

The first step is to choose the type of cloud database that’s right for your specific business purpose. The needs of your applications, the skills of your development team, and your data analytics and AI needs will help you determine the right database engine.

The next step is to select a provider that offers a fully managed service for the database engine that you’ve chosen. Research the provider’s track record with security, reliability, and experience in your industry. Make sure the provider can scale for your future growth, and ask if there are professional services offerings and financial incentives for migrating to their database services. 

Cloud providers differ in their technological ability. Look for a provider that uses the latest advances in AI technology, both to power their database automation and to simplify your experience as a database developer and user. 

Once you’ve selected a provider, look into your database migration options. Although migration takes time and money, the gains in efficiency, reliability, scalability, functionality, and security make it a worthwhile investment.