A Money Saving Practice — Serverless Database

The Explanation of Serverless Database

Despite the name, serverless does not imply that there are no servers. Instead, you don’t have to provision, manage, or pay for the underlying servers.

When a request for a serverless service is received, the cloud provider assigns an instance (virtual machine) or pod (a logical group of containers, commonly managed by Kubernetes) from its pool to handle the request. The allocated resources are returned to the pool when the serverless code terminates. Generally, the resources you use are charged based on the CPU capacity, RAM allocation, and time active.

Serverless functions and services can communicate with one another, as well as with other services, and can write to shared file systems and databases. One of the most significant technical benefits of serverless operations is their great scalability: Unlike provisioned servers, which can be easily overwhelmed by traffic spikes, new serverless function instances are launched for every event that needs them, and all instances immediately return to the pool when no longer required.

Serverless functions and services usually have high availability. Using a single server, virtual machine, or container to run a service, the probability of an eventual service outage from a machine or data centre failure is high. Cloud providers generally maintain redundant compute capacity for serverless functions across multiple availability zones (data centres in different but nearby physical locations) in each service region.

Key Elements of Serverless Database

Automated Elastic Scale

The scalable serverless database fulfils the unexpected demands of developers throughout the world by scaling down to zero when there is no demand and immediately spinning up when any requirement comes in from any region. Some of them are capable of transporting data all across the world, providing users with a seamless experience.

Simplicity

The serverless database is simple and easy to use for developers and beginners as well. For them, it is as simple as working with an API. Simplistic features like self-service start and REST APIs with fully manageable operations make the serverless database the first choice for developers to manage and control the app database.

Speed of Deployment

The serverless database management system is faster than the traditional system and easy to use. You can create a new database cluster in minutes. You don’t have to spend the time installing, capacity planning, scaling, and configuring your database as you would with a traditional system.

Consumption-based Billing

As discussed above, the serverless database is the cost-effective model as it is charged based on consumption, i.e., it follows the pay-as-you-use model. You do not need to pay for storage; you have to pay for the resources you use. You can also set a spending limit if you look forward to avoiding budget overrun.

Why Should You Use Serverless Database?

Traditional databases should be sized based on the maximum expected query load and storage capacity. By scaling the database up and down without data migration, you can save money by scaling up the CPU during high traffic and scaling it down during low traffic.

Serverless databases usually don’t require resizing at all. You don’t pay for CPU until you send a query, at which point you get the capacity your query needs. You will then pay for the capacity you use multiplied by the time the database is active. Unfortunately, you still have to pay for data storage. According to Amazon, Aurora Serverless can save you up to 90% in database costs compared to the cost of provisioning peak load capacity.

Examples of Serverless Databases

As of this writing, the following nine serverless databases are available. The tenth, MongoDB Atlas, is previewing serverless instances. It won’t be surprising if other database vendors with cloud versions (like Oracle) add serverless versions at some point in the future.

Amazon Aurora Serverless

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, currently in preview, scales instantly from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second. As it scales, it adjusts capacity in fine-grained increments to provide just the right amount of database resources that the application needs.

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at any scale. DynamoDB offers built-in security, continuous backups, automated multi-region replication, in-memory caching, and data export tools.

Azure SQL Database Serverless

Serverless is a compute tier for single databases in Azure SQL Database that automatically scales compute based on workload demand and bills for the amount of compute used per second. Azure SQL Database Serverless is a version of Microsoft SQL Server.

Fauna DB

A developer-friendly, transactional and first-ever serverless database, FaunaDB is a globally distributed serverless database. It is available on-demand; developers can connect to FaunaDB in seconds. It has driver support for multiple languages like Python, Java, Scala, GraphQL, etc.

Developers do not need to worry about database provisioning, sharding, scaling, replication, or maintenance when enterprises have modernised their OLTP infrastructure using FaunaDB. If you’re developing new microservices or expanding or upgrading your existing applications, FaunaDB is one of the top choices, as it lets you simplify code and speed up the delivery process.

Saving Money With Serverless

The serverless database is ideal for smaller businesses or businesses with a limited crew. It requires fewer people and relatively minimal infrastructure support and maintenance. Additionally, it has the following benefits.

Cost-Effective And High Scalability

With the serverless database, you can save your time and avoid operational overhead costs that include licence, installation, cabling, configuration, maintenance, and support. Operators or developers do not need to set up scaling computing systems manually. In addition, you can optimally utilise resources based on your requirements to build applications. You do not need to pay more for underutilised resources, just pay for what you use and focus on what matters the most to build high-quality applications.

Improved Operations, Scalability and Performance

Rely on, always available, and easy to handle serverless databases to improve your digital product development operations. Instead of hassling efforts related to database management, your developers can use time, memory, or resources efficiently to build, deploy, and maintain applications. Because the database-as-a-service provider is responsible for scaling the capacity to meet your new product development needs. Furthermore, developers or development teams do not need to depend on a separate infrastructure support team. They can focus on coding and run the code independently and deliver applications faster. Adopting the serverless paradigm has enabled developers to shorten the product development life cycle by weeks, offering faster market launches for their products.

Highly Secure

Keeping your database secure is important when it comes to rapid app development in today’s digital world. Because applications are more exposed to cyber risks nowadays. And database-as-a-service providers are responsible for securing all the cloud components and OS vulnerabilities. However, serverless brings new security challenges for developers as they are responsible for developing applications by writing application logic, code, data, and security-related layered configurations. When using the serverless database, the platform handles resources, monitors all the running servers, manages OS patches, eliminates any compromised server automatically, and copes with its negative equivalent.

Conclusion

As part of our ongoing series of blogposts about Serverless, we mentioned serverless databases! Serverless databases offer highly scalable, cloud-based data storage and retrieval without requiring you to provision CPU or storage ahead of time. Serverless database works well as a money saving practice, and we hope this new insight turns you more towards it.