Reducing Your Database Hosting Costs: DigitalOcean vs. AWS vs. Azure

If you’re hosting your databases in the cloud, choosing the right cloud service provider is a significant decision to make for your long-term hosting costs. This is especially apparent in today's world where organizations are doing whatever they can to optimize and reduce their costs. Over the last few weeks, we have been inundated with requests from SMB customers looking to improve the ROI on their database hosting. In this article, we are going to compare three of the most popular cloud providers, AWS vs. Azure vs. DigitalOcean for their database hosting costs for MongoDB® database to help you decide which cloud is best for your business.

Comparing Cloud Instance Costs

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Important Health Checks for your MySQL Master-Slave Servers

In a MySQL master-slave high availability (HA) setup, it is important to continuously monitor the health of the master and slave servers so you can detect potential issues and take corrective actions. In this blog post, we explain some basic health checks you can do on your MySQL master and slave nodes to ensure your setup is healthy. The monitoring program or script must alert the high availability framework in case any of the health checks fails, enabling the high availability framework to take corrective actions in order to ensure service availability.

MySQL Master Server Health Checks

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Follower Clusters – 3 Major Use Cases for Syncing SQL & NoSQL Deployments

Follower clusters are a ScaleGrid feature that allows you to keep two independent database systems (of the same type) in sync. Unlike cloning or replication, this allows you to maintain an active, point-in-time copy of your production data. This extra cluster, known as a follower cluster, can be leveraged for multiple use cases, including for analyzing, optimizing and testing your application performance for MongoDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL. In this blog post, we will cover the top three scenarios to leverage follower clusters for your application.

How Do Follower Clusters Differ From Replication?

Unlike a static clone, this data imports on a set schedule so your follower cluster is always in sync with your production cluster. Here are a few critical ways in which it differs from replication:

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PostgreSQL Connection Pooling: Part 2 – PgBouncer

When it comes to connection pooling in the PostgreSQL world, PgBouncer is probably the most popular option. It’s a very simple utility that does exactly one thing – it sits between the database and the clients and speaks the PostgreSQL protocol, emulating a PostgreSQL server. A client connects to PgBouncer with the exact same syntax it would use when connecting directly to PostgreSQL – PgBouncer is essentially invisible.

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How to Improve MySQL AWS Performance 2X Over Amazon RDS at The Same Cost

AWS is the #1 cloud provider for open-source database hosting, and the go-to cloud for MySQL deployments. As organizations continue to migrate to the cloud, it’s important to get in front of performance issues, such as high latency, low throughput, and replication lag with higher distances between your users and cloud infrastructure. While many AWS users default to their managed database solution, Amazon RDS, there are alternatives available that can improve your MySQL performance on AWS through advanced customization options and unlimited EC2 instance type support. ScaleGrid offers a compelling alternative to hosting MySQL on AWS that offers better performance, more control, and no cloud vendor lock-in and the same price as Amazon RDS. In this post, we compare the performance of MySQL Amazon RDS vs. MySQL Hosting at ScaleGrid on AWS High Performance instances.

TLDR

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PostgreSQL Connection Pooling: Part 1 – Pros & Cons

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, ‘threads’ were a programming novelty rarely used and seldom trusted. In that environment, the first PostgreSQL developers decided forking a process for each connection to the database is the safest choice. It would be a shame if your database crashed, after all.

Since then, a lot of water has flown under that bridge, but the PostgreSQL community has stuck by their original decision. It is difficult to fault their argument – as it’s absolutely true that:

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Redis Cloud Gets Easier with Fully Managed Hosting on Azure

ScaleGrid, a rapidly growing leader in the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) space, has just launched their new fully managed Redis on Azure service. This Redis management solution allows startups up to enterprise-level organizations automate their Redis operations on Microsoft Azure dedicated cloud servers, alongside their other open source database deployments, including MongoDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Redis, the #1 key-value store and top 10 database in the world, has grown by over 300% in popularity over that past 5 years, per the DB-Engines knowledge base. The demand for Redis is skyrocketing across dozens of use cases, particularly for cache, queues, geospatial data, and high speed transactions. This simple database management system makes it very easy to store and retrieve pairs of keys and values, and is commonly paired with other database types to increase the speed and performance of an application. According to the 2019 Open Source Database Report, a majority of Redis deployments are used in conjunction with MySQL, and over half of Redis deployments are used with either PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch.

ScaleGrid’s Redis hosting service allows these organizations to automate all of their time-consuming management tasks, such as backups, upgrades, scaling, replication, sharding, monitoring, alerts, log rotations, and OS patching, so their DBAs, developers, and DevOps teams can focus on new product development and optimizing performance. Additionally, organizations can customize their Redis persistence and host through their own Azure account which allows them to leverage advanced cloud capabilities like Azure Virtual Networks (VNET), Security Groups, and Reserved Instances to reduce long-term hosting costs up to 60%. 

“Cloud reliability has never been so important,” says Dharshan Rangegowda, Founder and CEO of ScaleGrid. “It’s crucial for organizations to properly configure their Redis deployments for high availability and disaster recovery, as a couple minutes of downtime can be detrimental to a company’s security and reputation.”

ScaleGrid is the only Redis cloud service that allows you to customize your master-slave and cross-datacenter configurations for 100% uptime and availability across 30 different Azure regions. They also allow you to keep full Redis admin access and SSH access to your machines, and you can learn more about their advantages over competitors Compose for Redis, RedisGreen, Redis Labs and Elasticache for Redis on their Compare Redis Providers page.

Managing High Availability in PostgreSQL – Part III: Patroni

In our previous blog posts, we discussed the capabilities and functioning of PostgreSQL Automatic Failover (PAF) by Cluster Labs and Replication Manager (repmgr) by 2ndQuadrant. In the final post of this series, we will review the last solution, Patroni by Zalando, and compare all three at the end so you can determine which high availability framework is best for your PostgreSQL hosting deployment.

• Managing High Availability in PostgreSQL – Part I: PostgreSQL Automatic Failover
• Managing High Availability in PostgreSQL – Part II: Replication Manager
• Managing High Availability in PostgreSQL – Part III: Patroni

Patroni for PostgreSQL

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Top Redis Use Cases by Core Data Structure Types

Redis, short for Remote Dictionary Server, is a BSD-licensed, open-source in-memory key-value data structure store written in C language by Salvatore Sanfillipo and was first released on May 10, 2009. Depending on how it is configured, Redis can act like a database, a cache or a message broker. It’s important to note that Redis is a NoSQL database system. This implies that unlike SQL (Structured Query Language) driven database systems like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, Redis does not store data in well-defined database schemas which constitute tables, rows, and columns. Instead, Redis stores data in data structures which makes it very flexible to use. In this blog, we outline the top Redis use cases by the different core data structure types.

Data Structures in Redis

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2019 Open Source Database Report: Top Databases, Public Cloud vs. On-Premise, Polyglot Persistence

Ready to transition from a commercial database to open source, and want to know which databases are most popular in 2019? Wondering whether an on-premise vs. public cloud vs. hybrid cloud infrastructure is best for your database strategy? Or, considering adding a new database to your application and want to see which combinations are most popular? We found all the answers you need at the Percona Live event last month, and broke down the insights into the following free trends reports:

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