What UpCloud offers you<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Let’s briefly explain what DBaaS means. It is an acronym that stands for \u201cDatabase-as-a-Service\u201d. The user doesn\u2019t need to manage infrastructure or configuration, only responsible for the data. Everything that is managed by the vendor is described in the linked article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At UpCloud, we understand that developers don\u2019t want to commit time to provisioning and maintaining databases. That is why we offer managed services, which shift most of the maintenance burden from the developer\u2019s shoulders to our dedicated and experienced team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What you get: flexibility out of the box<\/h2>\n\n\n\nSelection of database engines<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Flexibility of Managed Database Service starts with the choice of different database engines. UpCloud offers 4 different engines:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Relational databases<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Non-relational databases<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Depending on the database, we can choose from different versions of the database engine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is crucial for teams that aren’t ready to run the most recent version of the engine, whether due to stability requirements or technical debt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While all engines are similar in their provisioning process via the GUI, API, SDK, or CLI, we need to remember that most of the examples in this article apply to PostgreSQL. Especially for OpenSearch and Valkey, the selection of nodes, options, etc., can be slightly different, due to engine specifics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Databases must be run on some infrastructure. In a cloud environment, we sometimes run databases by purchasing a virtual machine and installing the database software ourselves. However, this doesn’t offer the benefits of using Managed Databases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n UpCloud offers many advantages with its plans, with infrastructure tailored to your needs. By selecting a plan family from the image above, you define our infrastructure needs, and within each family, we can select a specific plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, if you want to have a database for quick tests? Or a home project? You don\u2019t need to plan these databases yourself. UpCloud\u2019s Developer plans are affordable and give exactly what you might need – small, reliable databases we can quickly deploy and start using! The size of the underlying instance is one thing. Equally important is storage for our data. upCloud offers an extremely easy way of selecting how much storage we need. It is literally one click.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The power of Managed services is that we can scale them very easily. Scaling here doesn\u2019t just mean switching to a bigger host. Reliability here means how the infrastructure is deployed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For small, private, or test environments, a single-node deployment is sufficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But for production-ready workloads, we want to achieve high availability, performance, resilience, and a high SLA, like 99.99%. For this, we need more nodes in the cluster. One node will act as the primary writer, while the others serve as readers. This approach avoids the write\/read bottlenecks that are common in many applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n UpCloud offers three options: one, two, or three nodes in your setup. Three nodes guarantee extreme performance and SLA for your application. It is important to note that the number of possible nodes in a cluster may vary based on the database engine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now we can think \u201cok, that sounds cool, but it will cost me bags of money, probably\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, not necessarily. UpCloud\u2019s plans have a variety of price ranges, starting at 9 Euros! With three nodes in your cluster, the cheapest offer is still affordable and worth considering. And we know the price immediately, we don\u2019t even need to commit to anything, the price is shown in real time next to our selection page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is one of the biggest advantages of managed databases. Do we want to upgrade the engine version? Do we want to change something in the configuration? Is any security patching required?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of these will be done by the vendor\u2019s team and for most of them we will not even notice that something happened. Especially if we run a multicluster setup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing to explain, though. It is crucial how we design our application. If it is written in a way that causes the app to create a \u201chard connection\u201d to the database, it will encounter an issue sooner or later. Probably sooner than later. We have to understand that in a cloud, dynamic environment, we have to write our code accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Too often, we saw situations when \u201csomething happened,\u201d and we lost all our data from the database. No backup, no copy, no mirror, no replica. The problem is known and often presented in a humorous way – there are two types of people: those who don\u2019t do backups, and those who do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n UpCloud\u2019s Managed Database Service makes backups easier than ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n UpCloud gives us not only the ability to create backups but also to decide how we want to back them up. How many copies do we want to store, how often do we want to back up, and how long do we want to keep copies available?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The thing we need to understand is that a vendor like UpCloud doesn’t have any access to your data. These backups are done as snapshots of the whole block storage. The backups contain not only the data but also everything else, including engine configurations, users, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The truth is that there are three types of users. Those who don\u2019t do backups, those who do, and those who actually test backups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n UpCloud gives you a simple, quick way to restore a backup as a new instance (or cluster). In a few clicks and in a few minutes (depending on the amount of data, of course), we can have a fully functional database, restored from backup and ready to serve connections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We can even move our database to a different region!<\/p>\n\n\n\n The clone\/restore process is very simple:<\/p>\n\n\n\n So now, with Managed Database, there is no excuse for not testing our backups!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Data must be secure. It is obvious to everyone. UpCloud takes the security of our data very seriously. Data at rest is encrypted by default. But this is just the start. What is available for us to configure?<\/p>\n\n\n\n To access the database, we need a connection string. This requires some knowledge of the host machine configuration as well as the database configuration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n UpCloud provides a quick way to retrieve your connection string, without requiring you to understand how it is built or configured. Rest assured, the connection is secured, the database is secured, and all these aspects are properly taken care of by the vendor!<\/p>\n\n\n\n To access the database, we need a connection string and a user who can operate on it. As we can expect, different engines have different ways of creating users, maintaining them, and granting privileges to databases, tables, and other objects. UpCloud offers a simple, quick way to create and manage users in the Hub.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This makes the whole process easier and, most importantly, repeatable. We will talk about repeatability soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Developers are part of UpCloud\u2019s DNA, and our DBaaS is no different. The entire lifecycle management of databases is very simple, and everything can be done through the Hub (UpCloud UI). <\/p>\n\n\n\n But that\u2019s not all!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Developers rely on console tools, and UpCloud provides them for you! API compatible with the OpenAPI spec, a CLI tool called upcli that is really simple and easy to use, SDKs for many programming languages, and IaC tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s stay for a second here. IaC is one of the most important principles of DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering teams. There is no repeatability and advanced management of cloud resources without IaC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n UpCloud offers a few ways to manage infrastructure with IaC. Crossplane integration, Pulumi, Ansible collections, and OpenTofu and Terraform providers. What is very important, we can export OpenTofu\/Terraform configuration directly from UpCloud\u2019s Hub!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s explain one of the misleading concepts here. Sometimes we see that storage is 10GB; sometimes 10 GiB. Well, it is not the same thing, but written differently or by mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GB is a decimal description. 1GB is equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes, and it is used mainly to provide the size of the memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GiB describes disk size; it is a binary unit, better suited to how hardware counts space. 1GiB is equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we look at Managed Databases offerings (not only at UpCloud) this is exactly what we will see – machines with some memory size, counted in GB and storage, counted in GiB.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Choosing a Managed Database was never just about the database itself; it is about what comes with it – configuration options, maintenance services, and so on. With UpCloud, that list is long, no patching scheduled, no ad-hoc security patching, no failover problems, no backups to manually make and check.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What you get is a production-ready, replicated, and encrypted service that handles backup procedures on your behalf. And easily wired into the developer’s ecosystem with dev tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With UpCloud\u2019s Managed Databases, we don\u2019t just get a database. We get our time back, along with a vast experience in running and maintaining databases. And all of it is available starting for less than 10 Euros.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Would you like to learn more about UpCloud\u2019s Managed Database offering? Check out our Managed Databases page<\/a>,\u00a0and if you have any questions,\u00a0contact our team<\/a>\u00a0anytime!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You don\u2019t have the time or the specialized knowledge to constantly keep an eye on your databases, right? I know the feeling: managing configurations, patching, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":87325,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"808,493,283,415,865,475","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"Blocked by a filter function","footnotes":""},"categories":[348,13,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-databases","category-data-sovereignty","category-upcloud-insights"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4105"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9215,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4105\/revisions\/9215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
Available versions of the database engines<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/database-engine-versions.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nPlans for All Use Cases<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/infrastructure-plans-1-1024x261.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Why is this very important? What database do we have on production? One from Managed Databases offering? If so, why shouldn\u2019t we perform any other work using a different managed database? All environments should be consistent, and this requirement extends to your databases as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\nStorage size<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/storage-plans-1024x406.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWhat you get: reliability by design<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Number of nodes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/number-of-nodes-selection-1024x428.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/how-much-it-will-costs-396x1024.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nMaintenance in the background<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What you get: data protection in the DNA of the service<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Automated backups<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/backups-1024x468.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nBackup restoration<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/clone-database-1024x363.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/clone-database-details-1024x605.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWhat you get: security without compromises<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Database access<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/connection-strings-1024x361.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Everything that developers need to know about connecting to the database is here.<\/p>\n\n\n\nManage users<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/create-user-1024x520.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWhat you get: built for developers to use<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"-\"](\"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/media\/export-to-iac-1024x664.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
This means we can create the resources manually in the UI, and when we are ready, we can simply export the configuration as Terraform code. Very useful functionality, which should be used by every team!<\/p>\n\n\n\nA little math we need<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n