DBaaS Reduces Total Cost of Ownership

Technical Advances Have Made Cloud Databases Feasible

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When all the incidental and ongoing expenses are factored in, the total cost involved in running a reliable, production-worthy database is far greater than most imagine. Specialist technicians need to be on call 24/7. Someone needs to understand how to set up, test, and restore reliable offsite backups, on a moment's notice. A DBA needs to be on hand to tune the server configuration. Someone has to schedule and run server upgrades. This all amounts to several additional full-time jobs in your organization. If these roles aren't staffed explicitly, well, they'll just stealthily leech away time and energy away from people in other roles — or worse, they won't get done at all, leaving the very core of your business exposed to disaster.

Outsourcing the database was cost-prohibitive for all but the largest firms until very recently. If you were prepared to spend six figures a month, sure, you could hire the big guys to put some DBAs onsite and tend to your database. Everyone else was stuck doing it themselves. This too often entailed directing a general purpose programmer or system administrator with no particular database experience to just install Postgres on a server somewhere, and then hope for the best. Periodic database failures were considered inevitable and accounted as simply a cost of doing business.

There is a better way: technical advances have permitted the Database as a service (DBaaS) paradigm to become viable for small and medium businesses. Ubiquitous cloud servers make it possible for DBaaS providers such as Database Labs to outsource their own underlying systems infrastructure and concentrate on adding value at the database layer, yielding database infrastructure that is both cheaper and better. Fast Internet connectivity makes it practical for the database to be physically far removed from application servers. Gigabytes of data can be sent around the world in milliseconds for pennies. This was not the case even 10 years ago.

More and more companies are finding that they can greatly reduce their risk of ruin as well as achieve significant cost savings by shifting their database operations to a specialist service provider outside the company. As such a specialist provider, Database Labs runs specialized database operations that would not be cost effective for customers to operate on their own by achieving economy of scale. Specialist Postgres-trained tech support are on call 24 hours a day. Their only role is to operate Postgres databases, so they get very good at it. We've spent a lot of time tuning Postgres and instrumenting it with monitoring systems. We run test backup restorations regularly, just to ensure that they work and we can restore them quickly.

All of this involves fixed overhead costs that are not practical for most companies to shoulder on their own. Fortunately, you don't have to. The Database as a Service paradigm amortizes these costs over many customers. A vast array of small and medium businesses can now benefit from the sort of top quality database management that was long restricted to enterprises.

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Database Labs: Your Postgres Partner

Database Labs stands ready to help as your rock-solid Postgres specialist. Write to support@databaselabs.io and tell us about your situation for a free consultation.