Cloud provider DigitalOcean recently released a pair of new managed data services. Their Managed MySQL and Redis offerings are on-demand and elastic, and offer a variety of sizes and high-availablity options.
In February of 2019, DigitalOcean launched their managed database service with PostgreSQL as the first supported engine. They shared that MySQL and Redis options were on the roadmap, and this month they delivered on that commitment. In a blog post about their Managed Databases for MySQL and Redis, André Bearfield of DigitalOcean explained how these databases reflect the simplicity and usability that's synonymous with their services.
Developers of all skill levels, even those with no prior experience in databases, can spin up database clusters with just a few clicks. Select the database engine, storage, vCPU, memory, and standby nodes and we take care of the rest.
DigitalOcean delivered capabilities one might expect from a managed database. They offer automatic software updates to the database engine and underlying operating system, in a maintenance window of your choosing. There are automatic daily backups that are retained for seven days. During instance failure, DigitalOcean automatically replaces failed nodes with new ones that pick up from the point of failure. For manual recovery from a backup, users restore into a new database instance.
Both Managed MySQL and Redis options support up to two standby nodes that take over automatically if the primary node fails. Managed MySQL customers can provision read-only nodes in additional geographic regions for horizontal scaling. Managed MySQL customers also get access to monitoring and proactive alerting functionality, and the ability to fork an entire cluster based on a specific point in time. Bearfield says that Managed Redis will also get database metrics and monitoring upon general availability.
Both the Managed MySQL and Redis offerings come with two cluster types: single node or high-availability. The single node clusters start at $15 per month and provide 1 GB of memory, 1 vCPU, and 10 GB of SSD disk storage. As evident by the name, the single node clusters aren't highly available, but do support automatic failover. The high availability clusters offer up to two standby nodes and begin at $50 per month. The single node plan offers database instances as large as 32 GB of RAM, 8 vCPUs, and 580 GB of storage. The high availability plan goes a notch larger with machines offering 64 GB of RAM, 16 vCPUs, and 1.12 TB of disk storage.
Whether you look at the 2019 Stack Overflow developer survey, Jetbrains 2019 Dev Ecosystem survey, or DBEngine rankings, it's clear that MySQL and Redis are wildly popular database engines. Shiven Ramji, DigitalOcean's VP of Product, says that the company is driven by supplying developers with what they need.
"With the additions of MySQL and Redis, DigitalOcean now supports three of the most requested database offerings, making it easier for developers to build and run applications, rather than spending time on complex management," said Shiven Ramji, DigitalOcean’s senior VP of Product. "The developer is not just the DNA of DigitalOcean, but the reason for much of the company’s success. We must continue to build on this success and support developers with the services they need most on their journey towards simple app development."
The Managed Databases for MySQL and Redis are currently available in a subset of regions globally, with DigitalOcean promising wider availability soon. For both engines, you're allowed up to 3 clusters per account, private networking is only available within the same datacenter region, and while clusters can be resized, they can only be made larger, not smaller. MySQL v8 is the supported edition with a handful of unsupported features, and Redis version 5 is offered with a few limitations.
During the past few years, DigitalOcean has expanded beyond offering low-cost virtual private servers. They've launched an object storage service, managed Kubernetes offering, more robust networking options, and now managed databases.