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DBaaS – How they make data scale

Service Model

Article from ADMIN 10/2012

By Dan Frost

What makes some of these stuff-as-a-service services go?

I live near the South Downs, a beautiful part of England – all fields, chalk pits, cottages, country pubs – apart from the parts that are motorways, factories, and airports. But this isn't San Francisco or even Silicon Roundabout, and sometimes I crave some of this nerdy action.

So I Skyped a few people to talk about their products – products I've used in production or just played with. This time, instead of finding out how to install it, I thought I'd learn how these guys solve the problem that matters most in the cloud: keeping something running all the time and at scale.

What's That?

Cloud means so many things, it's almost meaningless. Stuff-as-a-service is so overused it's become almost a dead phrase. We have milk-delivery-as-a-service and I went to beer-as-a-service this afternoon.

What's really interesting is how the -as-a-service people build what they build. How they turn machines, operating systems, scripts, and applications into a service that's better than simply installing the thing, and how they bundle a mix of doing-it-at-scale with doing it differently.

Anyone can install something with apt-get and friends, so what makes using someone else's installation and configuration on the cloud better than installing it yourself?

After I looked at Xeround, a cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS), a couple of months ago, I looked into more DBaaS providers. However, before I get to that, I want to introduce a new concept that was sent my way.