DBaaS in the Real World: Risks, Rewards & Tradeoffs
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What do you give up – and gain – when moving to a fully-managed cloud database? Now that database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) offerings have been “battle tested” in production, how is the reality matching up to the expectation? What can teams thinking of adopting a fully-managed DBaaS can learn from teams who have years of experience working with this deployment model? Join this webinar to dive into the reality of working with various high-performance DBaaS offerings. We’ll cover the following topics, all supported with real-world examples: - Developer flexibility - Cost variability - Security & privacy - Performance impact - Transparency & troubleshooting
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DBaaS in the Real World: Risks, Rewards & Tradeoffs
- 1. DBaaS in the Real World: Risks, Rewards & Tradeoffs Felipe Mendes, Solution Architect at ScyllaDB Michael Hollander, Director of Product at ScyllaDB
- 2. + For data-intensive applications that require high throughput and predictable low latencies + Close-to-the-metal design takes full advantage of modern infrastructure + >5x higher throughput + >20x lower latency + >75% TCO savings + Compatible with Apache Cassandra and Amazon DynamoDB + DBaaS/Cloud, Enterprise and Open Source solutions The Database for Gamechangers 2 “ScyllaDB stands apart...It’s the rare product that exceeds my expectations.” – Martin Heller, InfoWorld contributing editor and reviewer “For 99.9% of applications, ScyllaDB delivers all the power a customer will ever need, on workloads that other databases can’t touch – and at a fraction of the cost of an in-memory solution.” – Adrian Bridgewater, Forbes senior contributor
- 3. 3 +400 Gamechangers Leverage ScyllaDB Seamless experiences across content + devices Digital experiences at massive scale Corporate fleet management Real-time analytics 2,000,000 SKU -commerce management Video recommendation management Threat intelligence service using JanusGraph Real time fraud detection across 6M transactions/day Uber scale, mission critical chat & messaging app Network security threat detection Power ~50M X1 DVRs with billions of reqs/day Precision healthcare via Edison AI Inventory hub for retail operations Property listings and updates Unified ML feature store across the business Cryptocurrency exchange app Geography-based recommendations Global operations- Avon, Body Shop + more Predictable performance for on sale surges GPS-based exercise tracking Serving dynamic live streams at scale Powering India's top social media platform Personalized advertising to players Distribution of game assets in Unreal Engine
- 4. Introductions Felipe Mendes, Solution Architect at ScyllaDB + Years of experience with Linux and other distributed systems + An open source enthusiast + Passion towards helping businesses to achieve their most challenging goals Michael Hollander, Director of Product at ScyllaDB + Former full-stack developer at both startups & enterprises + Led product in various dev tools companies
- 5. Agenda + Why Revisit DBaaS? + The Five Pillars: + Developer Flexibility + Costs + Security + Performance + Management + Q&A
- 6. Why revisit DBaaS AGAIN?
- 7. Often promoted rewards I spend too much time and money maintaining my own data center “ “ I don't have the experts to implement and set up my database I want to focus on application development and delivery I don’t know how to scale the database when my business grows “ “ “ “ “ “ Seamless Scale Security Hardening 24/7 Support High Availability Low-latency Network Ease of Use
- 8. Shared responsibility Cluster Management Provisioning Regular Upgrades Backup/Restore Security Alert Monitoring Schema Management Application Development Cluster Management Provisioning Regular Upgrades Backup/Restore Security Alert Monitoring Schema Management Application Development Managed by you Managed by you Managed by your provider Self-managed DBaaS
- 9. Focus Goals Speed Costs What a DBaaS helps me achieve? + Define your workload needs + Understand the vendor roadmap + Can I become locked-in? How easy is it to get started? + Learning curve + Potential limitations + How much time does it saves you? How much is this going to cost? + Do the benefits outweigh costs? + Are there hidden costs? + Where do I want to be in the future?
- 11. Rewards Ecosystem Integration DBaaS typically integrate easily with most stacks, including CI/CD. Zero impact schema changes are a plus. Self-Service The developer back in control. Self-service capabilities bring more speed and agility to businesses, and allow fast creation and tear-down of environments.
- 12. Risks Lock-In Consider all the aspects involved to move in and out from the vendor. How easy is it to have access to a backup? Does using a specific API or feature restrict you in anyway on par to other solutions? Technology Refresh DBaaS vendors manage tons of deployments and – unless you hit a "stop the world" bug – it is unlikely that you will be the first in line to receive quality service updates.
- 13. Tradeoffs Learning Curve Although easy and simple to get started, every DBaaS solution requires a learning curve. Integrating and switching fully to a new platform may take some time and effort. Lack of Customization DBaaS try to be as general purpose as possible, allowing for very little customization. This may be an impediment if your organization relies on specific features
- 14. Cost variability
- 15. Rewards Reduced Infrastructure & Staffing Costs DBaaS eliminates the need for investing in physical infrastructure and staff. Allowing organizations to allocate resources more efficiently and focus on core business operations and innovation. Deployment Flexibility DBaaS providers offer pay-as-you-go pricing model, so you only pay for resources you use, avoiding overprovisioning & wasted resources. BYOA model leverages your existing cloud provider infrastructure to save on infra costs.
- 16. Risks Unpredictable Cost Scaling As your application's workload increases, the cost of scaling your database may not be linear or predictable. Unexpected usage spikes or sudden scaling needs can lead to higher costs. Hidden or Unanticipated Costs While DBaaS providers provide transparent pricing, there can be hidden or unanticipated costs that arise during usage. These could be related to additional services or specific features not covered by the base pricing.
- 17. Tradeoffs Limited Cost Optimization Options DBaaS provide cost savings but may limit ability to optimize costs to the same extent as self-managed DBs. Optimizing hardware configurations or fine-grained performance tuning may be restricted due to constraints of the DBaaS environment. Cost Comparisons and TCO Evaluating cost tradeoffs between DBaaS and self-managed DBs requires TCO analysis. Consider hardware, licenses, maintenance, personnel, and other operational expenses. Compare these costs to DBaaS subscription fees and additional expenses.
- 18. Estimate costs with pricing calculator ScyllaDB Cloud Pricing
- 20. Security & privacy + Data stored in the cloud is more likely to be exposed to hacking, breaches and unauthorized access. + To mitigate these risks, look for a DBaaS vendor that has flexible security measures in place, such as encryption, multi-factor authentication and regular security audits. + Companies with strict security requirements should also look for a vendor that meets regulatory requirements by providing: + Single Sign-on (SSO) + Data encryption + SOC 2 and ISO 27001 Certification + As an enterprise org, If you have even stricter security requirements, you can use a BYOA solution, providing increased degree of control over your data.
- 22. Rewards Co-location Place data close to users and applications, reducing latency. Multi-regional deployments and "always-on" architectures are made simple, allowing for smart replication to selected locations. Ease of Scale The Black Friday problem. An ideal DBaaS solution should seamlessly scale to adapt itself to workload demands, while it must be resilient enough to handle sudden spikes.
- 23. Risks Pay per operations Sustaining up to a few thousands of operations per second is generally fine, but scaling throughput beyond tens of thousands may break the bank. Hidden Limits / Quotas Many DBaaS have limits such as Item sizes. Others may even throttle down the workload, limiting the number of operations allowed, thus directly impacting your traffic.
- 24. Tradeoffs Limited Deployment Options DBaaS (as a business) primary goal is to sell managed solutions and contribute to your "growth". There isn't much flexibility in deployment options and not always the offered infrastructure is the most performance oriented solution. Maintenance and Operations As you defer the management of your database to a third-party, you may lose visibility on internal database operations and maintenance, making performance related problems more difficult to diagnose and more prone to impact your workloads
- 25. Management
- 26. Rewards Expert Consultation Sizing, data modeling, access patterns and other types of consultation are generally offered as part of a Services Agreement. Observability Observability is key for any organization operating at scale, and your DBaaS should generally offer you mechanisms to extract metrics, define alerts and integrate with your preferred solution.
- 27. Risks SLAs Think about this: If a disaster happens, what are the chances YOUR problem will be the first one to be looked at and prioritized from your DBaaS vendor perspective? Asking for Help Many DBaaS service tiers either do not include support or may lack qualified personnel to support you when a critical problem happens.
- 28. Tradeoffs Build Trust A long-term relationship is only successful when both sides understand their responsibilities. Be sure to select a DBaaS vendor committed to your success. Problems Happen! It is unfortunate, but problems WILL eventually happen. It happened for giant tech industries, so what would shield you away from it? When it happen, your vendor will be your only hope.
- 29. Q&A Free NoSQL Database Training scylladb.com/events ScyllaDB Cloud Start free Trial scylladb.com/cloud October 18 + 19, 2023 p99conf.io
- 30. Thank you for joining us today. @scylladb scylladb/ slack.scylladb.com @scylladb company/scylladb/ scylladb/
Editor's Notes
- PRESENTER - Felipe Welcome, everyone! My name is Felipe. I am a Solution Architect at ScyllaDB and I'll be your host for today's webinar: "DBaaS in the Real World: Risks, Rewards & Tradeoffs". Media Streaming is part of our daily lives nowadays. The number of key players within the streaming industry has been growing at a very fast pace. With so many options, it is no surprise that one of the business challenges of media streaming is how to attract more consumers to an engaging experience. Therefore, let me pose a question: What are going to be some of the aspects that will differentiate one platform from another, and how can we help?
- PRESENTER - Felipe For those of you who are not familiar with ScyllaDB yet, it is the database behind gamechangers - organizations whose success depends upon delivering engaging experiences with impressive speed. ScyllaDB was built with a close-to-the-metal design that squeezes every possible ounce of performance out of modern infrastructure. This translates to predictable low latency even at high throughputs. With such consistent innovation the adoption of our database technology has grown to over 400 key players worldwide
- PRESENTER - Felipe Many of you will recognize some of the companies among the selection pictured here, such as Starbucks who leverage ScyllaDB for inventory management, Zillow for real-time property listing and updates, and Comcast Xfinity who power all DVR scheduling with ScyllaDB. As it can be seen, ScyllaDB is used across many different industries and for entirely different types of use cases. More than often, your company probably has a use case that is a perfect fit for ScyllaDB and it may be that you don’t know it yet!
- PRESENTER - Michael Cost is another big topic when considering a move from self-managed to managed database solutions.
- Let’s start by taking a look at some of the rewards related to costs. DBaaS eliminates the need for physical infrastructure and dedicated staff. With DBaaS, you don't have to invest in hardware or worry about its maintenance. Instead, the infrastructure is provided and managed by the DBaaS vendor, which results in significant cost savings. By adopting DBaaS, you can allocate your resources more efficiently. You can focus on your core operations, innovation, and also improving the customer experience rather than spending on hardware procurement and management. In addition, DBaaS reduces staffing costs. With a self-managed database, companies need a dedicated team of devops engineers and developers. DBaaS, on the other hand, shifts these responsibilities to the vendor itself. So there is no need for a specialized database team. And this allows you to optimize your workforce and allocate the relevant staff to more strategic initiatives. Let’s move on to pricing and deployment. DBaaS providers usually offer two types of price plans, pay-as-you-go and annual pricing. The pay-as-you-go pricing model of DBaaS is particularly an advantage here. It eliminates the need for upfront capital and enables cost optimization by aligning expenses with actual database usage. This flexibility is beneficial for you if you’re a startup or an organization with limited resources. Now, most DBaaS vendors offer a single deployment model, where the customer’s DB sits on the vendor’s cloud provider infrastructure. There is another model also referred to as “bring your own account”, where the DB remains on your own organization’s cloud provider infrastructure. This deployment is especially beneficial for enterprises because if you have good relations with your cloud provider, you’ll be able to save costs on your infrastructure by obtaining pre-negotiated discounts. Also, since the database resources remain on your existing infrastructure, you won’t have to deal with additional security matters. And lastly, you will be able to manage your cloud provider bills in the same way as other existing infrastructure you are already consuming today.
- Let’s move on to the risks associated to moving to a DBaaS solution. The first risk we need to address is the unpredictable nature of cost scaling when using DBaaS. While it offers scalability, the cost of scaling your database may not follow a linear or easily predictable pattern. As your application's workload increases, there may be unexpected usage spikes, or sudden scaling needs, which can potentially lead to higher costs. When your application gets exposed to a sudden increase in traffic or data volume, the resource requirements for your database may increase significantly. This can result in unexpected expenses as you need to scale up your database to meet the growing demands. So it's essential for you to closely monitor and analyze the cost implications of scaling. And this is to avoid any surprises in your budget. Now, while DBaaS providers generally provide transparent pricing, there can still be costs that are not immediately visible. These costs often arise from additional services or specific features that may not be covered by the base pricing. For example, you may require specialized support or advanced features for your specific use case, and these services might come at an extra cost. It's crucial to carefully review the service-level agreements (SLAs) and pricing documentation provided by the DBaaS provider, so that you can identify any potential hidden costs. A concrete example is from one of our customers who switched from another vendor to ScyllaDB Cloud, after they had run into massive additional and unexpected variable costs. These costs were mainly associated to network usage. The costs were so unexpected and the engineers could not explain this internally on why this happened, and so some engineers were actually fired as a result. So, understanding and accounting for these hidden or unanticipated costs is important, both for accurate budgeting but also for cost management. It ensures that you have a comprehensive understanding of the total cost of ownership and that you can make a better informed decision regarding the most cost-effective approach for your organization.
- Now, let's dive into the tradeoffs associated with costs when using a DBaaS solution The first tradeoff we'll discuss is "Limited Cost Optimizations." While DBaaS solutions offer cost savings, they may limit the ability to optimize costs to the same extent as self-managed databases. In a DBaaS environment, optimizing hardware configurations or applying performance tuning may be restricted due to the constraints which were imposed by the service provider. DBaaS solution also provide a standardized infrastructure that caters to a wide range of use cases. So while this simplifies operations, it may limit your ability to implement very customized cost-saving strategies. So it's essential to evaluate the extent to which you can optimize costs within the boundaries of your DBaaS environment. For example, optimizing hardware configurations or adjusting resource allocation may be restricted in a DBaaS environment. Also, fine-tuning the parameters specific to your workload or implementing specialized caching strategies may also have some limitations. So bottomline, you should be carefully evaluating these considerations in order to determine the impact on your cost optimization efforts. Moving on to the next tradeoff, "Cost Comparisons and TCO." When comparing the costs between DBaaS and self-managed databases, performing an analysis of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is essential. This analysis involves considering various factors such as hardware, licenses, maintenance, personnel, and other operational expenses associated with managing a database in-house. It's crucial to compare these costs against the ongoing subscription fees and any additional expenses associated with the DBaaS solution. This evaluation allows you to make an informed decision by understanding the true cost implications of each option. By conducting a TCO analysis, you can evaluate the long-term financial impact of using a DBaaS solution against managing your database infrastructure in-house. This analysis will provide you with a holistic view of the costs involved and can also help you in making a well-informed decision based on your organization's specific requirements and budget considerations.
- So we went through the different cost implications when moving to DbaaS. Now, I also wanted to highlight our ScyllaDB Cloud pricing calculator which we’ve built, which compares the price between different scenarios of ScyllaDB and other vendors, such as DynamoDB. Ofcourse, you shouldn’t take our word for it, and you should just compare it for yourself using the calculator which is available on our website. You can apply your custom measurements, and then just compare the results.
- Moving on to Security and privacy
- When migrating a database to the cloud, one of the biggest concerns is security. Data stored in the cloud is more exposed to hacking, breaches and unauthorized access. To mitigate these risks, your organization should choose and ensure that your DBaaS provider has robust security measures in place, such as encryption, access controls, multi-factor authentication. But it should also undergo regular security audits. In addition, DBaaS solutions often offer backup and disaster recovery mechanisms. This can minimize the risk of data loss in the event of a system failure, natural disaster, or even a cyberattack. This reduces the burden on your organization to set up and manage your own data replication and backup strategies. As a company, you usually have organizational policies and requirements for accessing external tools or platforms. So you should make sure that your DBaaS vendor offers capabilities such as single Sign-on (SSO), data Encryption, and relevant certifications such as SOC 2 compliance, which provides an independent assessment of how well the DB vendor manages data with respect to security and availability, confidentiality, and ofcourse privacy. Also, some DBaaS vendors utilize shared infrastructure, where multiple clients' databases are hosted on the same physical infrastructure. This shared environment introduces a level of risk, as a security breach or vulnerability in one client's database could potentially impact others. Your organization should assess the vendor’s isolation and segregation mechanisms in order to mitigate these risks and ensure you get consistent data privacy. Finally, if you are an enterprise organization with strict security requirements, you can use a BYOA deployment model approach which I referred to in an earlier slide, which will allow all of your DB data to be located inside your existing pre-approved infrastructure.
- PRESENTER - Felipe
- PRESENTER - FELIPE Thank you all very much for attending today. In due time, you will find this presentation available on the ScyllaDB dot com home page in our webinars section for on-demand viewing. If you would like to weigh in on what we present in the future, please Contact Us, either via the form on our website, or on Twitter. We’d love to hear your ideas. For now, on behalf of Michael and myself, and all of us at ScyllaDB, enjoy the rest of your day.
- PRESENTER - Michael Network can be very expensive (data intensive with high throughput - will not be cost effective). Pay per operations service models can bring surprising bills. Dynamo - scylla comparison - we never talked about multi-region in previous talks/slides. Prices for global-table (table in dynamodb which lives in more than one region). (equivalent in dynamodb) are very high. Price for cross-region + price on outbound traffic. Looks like customers like Disney pay lots of money for this, but this may be a hidden cost in DynamoDB. Think about doing a slide on this. (See Avi’s email) The base service (hosting) costs were well known in advance. They knew them both for DynamoDB and ScyllaDB. I understood the furor was over networking costs. The networking costs has the same model in ScyllaDB and DynamoDB: you pay for every byte that transit the network. BYOA: If maintaining special prices from your cloud provider is important to your org, find a DBaaS solution that can provide a model called BYOA (bring your own account). If your company is big enough, you probably have your CFO is looking at your cloud provider bill; You’d like to simplify and have all of your AWS spending tallied up in one place. Plus, within your own AWS Account you likely have pre-negotiated discounts. With ScyllaDB Cloud BYOA, we provide a fully managed NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that runs in your AWS account. You pay only the subscription fees for ScyllaDB; all of your infrastructure expenses are paid directly to AWS, through your existing accounts.
- PRESENTER - Michael If maintaining special prices from your cloud provider is important to your org, find a DBaaS solution that can provide a model called BYOA (bring your own account). If your company is big enough, you probably have your CFO is looking at your cloud provider bill; You’d like to simplify and have all of your AWS spending tallied up in one place. Plus, within your own AWS Account you likely have pre-negotiated discounts. With ScyllaDB Cloud BYOA, we provide a fully managed NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that runs in your AWS account. You pay only the subscription fees for ScyllaDB; all of your infrastructure expenses are paid directly to AWS, through your existing accounts. In general, it is recommended to use both regions and availability zones to achieve the highest level of availability and reliability for your applications and services. A region is a physical location around the world where AWS hosts one of its multiple data centers. Each region is divided into multiple availability zones, which are isolated data centers within a region. An availability zone (AZ) is a separate data center that contains its own power, networking, and connectivity resources. Each availability zone is designed to be independent of the others, with its own power and network connectivity, to minimize the risk of a single point of failure. However, using multiple regions or availability zones (AZs) typically results in a higher overall cloud computing bill due to the cost of hosting redundant workloads and data transfer fees when moving data between regions. AWS does not charge for data transfer between resources within the same Availability Zone (AZ) or for data transfer within the same region. This means that if you have resources, such as EC2 instances, or S3 buckets, deployed in the same AZ, you will not be charged for data transfer between them. In general, it is recommended to use multiple availability zones (AZs) when deploying applications in AWS to improve availability, fault tolerance, and resilience. However, In some scenarios, you may want to move to a single AZ instead of using cross-AZ traffic to save costs: Cost Restrictions: Deploying resources across multiple AZs incurs additional costs for data transfer and storage replication. If you have budget constraints and your application does not require high availability, you may consider using a single AZ to reduce costs. Low-risk and low latency applications: If your application is not mission-critical and can tolerate some downtime, using a single AZ may be appropriate. For example, if you are deploying a development or test environment, using a single AZ may be sufficient. In some cases, deploying resources in a single AZ can result in lower latency and faster response times. For example, if you are running a high-performance computing application that requires low-latency communication between nodes, deploying in a single AZ may be more appropriate. D References: Troubleshoot and optimize AWS cross-AZ traffic (lightlytics.com)
- PRESENTER - Michael Can you have better control on costs? I would argue you can, selecting an IaaS and DBaaS vendor should not be a lifelong bond! You should be able to exercise your buying power. Using an IaaS and DBaaS deployment strategy that is Cloud vendor agnostic will leave the choice of deployment in your hand. Use Kubernetes and cloud agnostic DBaaS deployment to keep the target deployment platform to your choice, and use a multi-cloud vendor approach. The multi cloud strategy will help with user experience as you will be able to deploy applications near your customers, with whichever cloud vendor that has resources available near the customers. Another aspect of control on DBaaS TCO, is the ability to consolidate existing workloads into the new DBaaS offering. Users of Scylla Cloud were able to consolidate dozens of Cassandra clusters into a single, fully managed cluster w/o interfering to the current application! Scylla Cloud users are using both the DynamoDB and the CQL API to interact with the application, it means that there is no need for application changes. This stability in the code base help keep the development costs down! And again, leaving the control in your hand on the application TCO.
- I’ll go through multiple factors you should consider when looking at cost variability, especially at cost savings but also potential revenue enhancements, and for each one I will talk about what makes ScyllaDB Cloud a cheaper alternative over other managed DB vendors available out there. There are 3 main factors that come into play here: Higher Throughput Lower Consistent Latency Deployment Type
- Let’s go through the first factor, Higher Throughput. Why does “Higher Throughput” translates to lower costs? It’s pretty straightforward. Let’s imagine you have an Apache Cassandra deployment of 24 servers or nodes. By moving to ScyllaDB and having each server work 10x faster - you can simply reduce the number of servers by a factor of 10 while still being able to handle the same amount of capacity or throughput. So this immediately translates into great savings. It’s a quick way to reduce your costs. Now, more than that, Scylla was designed with multi-core deployment from scratch. So if you want to, you can switch to fewer number of servers, but have larger servers with multi-core. This, btw, will sometimes not immediately let you save on costs, because for example in AWS, usually the size and price are proportional. So you get a bigger server with more storage, but it can also be more expensive. So to recap, higher throughput > less hardware > lower cost of operation
- The second factor which may be a little bit more tricky to grasp, is consistent latency. It can be translated in some cases to higher revenue. So ofcourse, this depends on your domain and application. You might write an application for which latency is completely irrelevant ofcourse, so this might not apply to you. But in many cases, and I brought here a few screen captures from various blogs and websites which cover this, lower latency actually can translate into higher revenue.
- In some industries it’s more straightforward. For example, with Algotrading or with ad-tech where you have a bidding mechanism in place, latency is critical, but this is also the case for the IoT industry, for example where you have a lot of events going into the same machine, latency is also critical. And there are other additional domains where this is true, such as Gaming or social apps. So I hope I established the fact that lower latency can in some cases, maybe in your case, translate into higher revenue. — latency sensitive domains: Bids and Ad Tech Algo trading IoT (insert) Gaming Chats and social (Discord)
- Moving on to the 3rd factor, Deployment Type. Most DBaaS vendors offer a single deployment model, where the customer’s DB sits on the vendor’s cloud provider infrastructure. There is another model also referred to as “bring your own account”, where the DB remains on the customer’s cloud provider infrastructure. This deployment is especially beneficial for enterprises because if you have good relations with your cloud provider, you’ll be able to save costs on your infrastructure by obtaining pre-negotiated discounts. Also, since the database resources remain on your existing infrastructure, you won’t have to deal with additional security matters. And lastly, you will be able to manage your cloud provider bills in the same way as other existing infrastructure you are consuming today.
- This is how with a workload that has a similar ratio between read and write operations, it translates into lower costs. With DynamoDB and Google Bigtable for example, we don’t count the amount of servers or anything like that, but you can and should compare the price that you pay per workload. As you can see, if you compare Scylla to DynamoDB for example, in this use case we get a 5th of the cost of dynamodb. But we also compare ScyllaDB to other vendors, and for each of those, the higher throughput translates immediately into lower costs.