Cloud Database Service: The Difference Between DBaaS, DaaS and Cloud Storage – What’s the difference?

Let’s try and make heads or tails of the various cloud services available and clarify the key differences between them.

Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) and Cloud Storage all relate to data management in the Cloud. The differences between them lie mainly in regards to the forms of data being stored and how the data is managed.

Cloud Storage services such as Amazon S3 or Dropbox enable users to store data in the cloud as they would on any other storage device, only the data is uploaded to a virtual storage.  By ‘data’ we’re generally referring to documents and objects being stored in the cloud for backup, DRP or distributed retrieval.

DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) describes the ability to define data lists in a cloud service and then query against this data.  DaaS is not to be confused with a database. Unlike database solutions, DaaS cannot be accessed via common interfaces (SQL or alike). DaaS is suitable only for basic data management querying and manipulation – think of a Microsoft-Access hosted and run by someone else and offered as a service.

A cloud database service, or DBaaS (Database-as-a-service) is the most robust data solution being offered as a service. DBaaS offers full-blown database functionality, accessed via common set of APIs.

In a cloud database service, the database tier in the backend is being overseen by a management layer that’s responsible for the continues monitoring and configuring of the database to achieve optimized scaling, high availability, multi-tenancy and effective resource allocation in the cloud. In a DBaaS solution, the developer is spared much of the hassles of the tedious ongoing DB management tasks and operations, as those are automatically handled by the service itself.

Cloud applications commonly connect to a database that is also being run on the cloud. It can take the form of a manually configured database, like MySQL on an Amazon EC2 instance; preconfigured MySQL, like Amazon RDS; or a native cloud Database-as-a-Service like Xeround’s MySQL cloud database. What we’ve seen is that native cloud databases are better equipped to optimally use cloud resources and to guarantee availability and stability, compared to “patched” software being adopted for cloud use.

When choosing a data solution for the cloud, application developers and IT managers need to asses their needs and the nature of the underlying service they seek. Do they only require a simple remote storage/ data retrieval, or do their applications require more extensive database operations? One also needs to assess the app’s growth potential and future uses and transactions.

And naturally, if your app does require a SQL database in the cloud – Xeround is here to help!