Soar higher in the cloud with MariaDB SkySQL

We couldn’t be more excited to announce the general availability of MariaDB SkySQL today!

It’s been years in the making, from the initial release of official MariaDB containers and Helm Charts back in 2018 to engineering-led sessions at OpenWorks ‘19 discussing design principles for a next-generation database-as-a-service (DBaaS) to initial feedback from customers participating in the limited technical preview earlier this year. All of this has led up to today’s launch of SkySQL cloud database in multiple regions across the world.

We created SkySQL because the world deserves, and demands, a DBaaS capable of meeting the requirements of enterprises with cloud strategies and the high standards of MariaDB itself. We raised the bar and redefined expectations for open source databases in the enterprise. Now… we’re doing the same thing for DBaaS.

SkySQL includes features you can’t find in database services such as Amazon RDS and Azure Database, including many of the ones customers running MariaDB on premises take advantage of every day. SkySQL provides customers with a level of support Amazon and Microsoft can never deliver, the same world-class support some of the largest enterprises in the world trust their businesses with. SkySQL will always allow customers to run on the latest stable version of MariaDB, never on old releases susceptible to missing bug fixes and security patches (we’re looking at you, Amazon Aurora).

SkySQL can deploy databases for transactions, analytics or both, eliminating the need to use (and pay for) separate services (e.g., Amazon RDS + Amazon Redshift).

However, that’s not what makes SkySQL so great, and so disruptive.

Quite simply, it’s the vision, architecture and technology decisions behind it.

Imagine if multi- and inter-cloud deployments were commonplace. If databases spanned public and private cloud infrastructure. If databases scaled from a single instance to hundreds. If machine learning drove continuous self-optimization. And it was easy. This is the future of databases in the cloud, and it’s what we built SkySQL for.

The most important design decision we made was to use Kubernetes as a cloud-agnostic platform for deploying databases. When we look at public clouds, we don’t see infrastructure-as-a-service providers. We see Kubernetes-as-a-service. Amazon has its Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Microsoft has its Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google has its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Then there is Red Hat OpenShift. Kubernetes is the key that will unlock all of these doors for SkySQL.

The other pivotal decision was to build the SkySQL portal on ServiceNow. There are two reasons why. First, inventory, configuration and workflow management are critical capabilities for a DBaaS, and ServiceNow is the leader in enterprise IT service management. It’s what they do, and they do it best. Second, in order to be truly cloud independent, SkySQL must not be dependent on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. By running on ServiceNow, SkySQL sits above the clouds – and allows you to soar higher.

Today is the first day of a truly exciting journey for the future of databases in the cloud, one marked by the launch of SkySQL around the world.

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