What is a Serverless Database?

A serverless database is a cloud-based database service that handles all database administration tasks like scaling, patching, failovers, and backups for you automatically. This allows developers to simply spin up a database and start using it, without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.

Some key benefits of serverless databases include:

• Auto-scaling based on usage – Database capacity scales up and down automatically
• Pay-per-use pricing – Only pay for the database capacity you provision and consume
• High availability – Built-in redundancy, failovers, and backup/restore capabilities
• Fully managed service – No servers, OS or database software to install, configure or manage

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll cover everything you need to know about serverless databases including:

• What is a serverless database
• Types of serverless databases
• Benefits of using a serverless database
• Popular serverless database options
• Key use cases for serverless databases
• How to get started with a serverless database

What Exactly is a Serverless Database?

A serverless database is a cloud-based database service that eliminates the need to provision or manage servers and database software.

With a fully managed serverless database like Amazon Aurora Serverless, a database instance is run for you on compute capacity that is managed, provisioned, scaled and optimized automatically.

So in simple terms – a serverless database is any database in the cloud that doesn’t require you to configure database servers or manage the database system. You simply create the database instance, connect your application and start using it.

The cloud provider handles all administration tasks like:

• Provisioning database capacity
• Configuring database instances
• Automated patching and upgrades
• Scaling compute and storage
• Ensuring high availability
• Backup and restore
• Monitoring database health

This allows you to focus on building application functionality rather than database administration.

You simply create a database instance, connect your application and start using it productively right away. The serverless database seamlessly scales capacity up and down based on usage needs.

Types of Serverless Databases

There are a few types of managed serverless database services available. The most common include:

Relational Serverless Databases

Relational databases use SQL and are optimized for transactional applications that require ACID compliance, complex joins and advanced data integrity features. Leading relational serverless databases include:

• Amazon Aurora Serverless – AWS relational database compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL that delivers auto-scaling capacity, high availability and is cost-effective.
• Azure SQL Database Serverless – Fully managed and auto-scaling Azure SQL database tier optimized for intermittent usage patterns.
• Google Cloud SQL Serverless – Fully-managed MySQL database service that scales capacity up and down automatically with per-second billing.

Serverless NoSQL Databases

NoSQL databases like MongoDB and DynamoDB scale easily and offer flexible data models for modern applications. Leading options include:

• AWS DynamoDB Serverless – Fully managed NoSQL database service from AWS that provides fast performance at any scale along with built-in security and in-memory caching.
• Azure CosmosDB Serverless – Globally distributed multi-model Azure database that auto-scales throughput and storage across any number of Azure regions.
• MongoDB Atlas Serverless – Fully managed cloud MongoDB service with auto-scaling, high availability, security features and operational tooling.

Additionally, cloud providers offer fully managed open-source database options like Amazon RDS for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and SQL Server which have some serverless capabilities to seamlessly scale compute capacity up and down as needed.

Key Benefits of a Serverless Database

There are several important benefits that a serverless database model provides over a traditional database deployment:

Pay-Per-Use Pricing

With a serverless database, you only pay for the actual database capacity you provision and consume. The database autoscales to match your workload demands.

So if application usage and traffic varies over time, your database can scale down during quiet periods to reduce costs. This makes serverless databases very cost-efficient for usage spikes and variable workloads.

Automated Management

Serverless databases eliminate the administrative burden of setting up and managing a database system yourself. Manual tasks like server provisioning, software installation, configuration, scaling, patching, upgrades, backups etc. are all handled automatically.

This allows your team to simply focus on product development rather than database ops work. It streamlines operations and reduces the expertise needed to run database systems reliably.

High Availability

Mission-critical availability and reliability is built-in with fully redundant serverless database services. The database system architecture ensures there is no single point of failure and seamless failovers to standby capacity.

Automatic multi-region replication provides disaster recovery abilities as well. This guards against data loss risks and minimizes application downtime.

Improved Security

Leading serverless databases incorporate advanced security capabilities like encryption, access controls, data masking, network isolation etc to safeguard application data.

Security scanning and hardened configurations provide additional protection against exploits. The automated patching ensures you stay up-to-date on the latest security fixes as well.

What are the Use Cases for a Serverless Database?

There are a few situations where a serverless database model makes more sense over managing databases yourself:

• Variable workloads – Application usage and traffic fluctuates over time. A serverless DB that scales capacity up/down matches demand.
• New applications – Quickly validate ideas and accelerate prototypes without managing database infrastructure.
• Infrequent usage – Apps that don’t need consistent database capacity are cost-efficient with serverless.
• Short-term projects – Temporary apps where managing database servers does not make sense.
• Spiky traffic – Usage spikes are easily handled by auto-scaling database capacity.
• Global applications – Serverless databases typically have multi-region abilities for low latency data access.

Basically any situation where managing database capacity and ops yourself does not make sense – a serverless database delivers the automation, flexibility and convenience needed.

And for mission-critical systems, serverless databases often incorporate advanced availability, durability and security capabilities exceeding what you may be able to achieve managing databases in-house.

Getting Started with a Serverless Database

If you want to get hands-on with playing around with a serverless database, AWS offers a generous free tier for Amazon Aurora Serverless that lets you try out a relational serverless database fully-featured for 750 hours of usage per month.

To start:

1. Sign-up for an AWS account if you don’t have one already.
2. Go to the AWS Management Console, navigate to the RDS service and choose “Create database“.
3. Pick “Standard Create” for a production database or “Dev/Test” for experimentation.
4. For Engine Options, choose “Amazon Aurora” then “Serverless v2“.
5. Configure initial database details – name, master credentials etc.
6. Choose instance size, connect VPC and security groups. The defaults are fine getting started.
7. Click Create database. In minutes, your serverless database will be ready for use!
8. Connect your application to the database endpoint / connection string AWS provides.

And that’s really all you need to get started using a fully managed and auto-scaling serverless database!

From there, you can easily create tables, load data and start running queries just like any regular database instance.

Behind the scenes AWS handles provisioning database capacity, storage, backups, security patches etc automatically. The serverless database scales seamlessly up and down based on your application’s needs.

So if you have an application that needs a database backend, trying out a serverless database is quick and easy to do!

Key Takeaways on Serverless Databases

Here’s a quick recap on some of the key aspects of serverless databases:

Hopefully this gives you a solid understanding on what serverless databases have to offer! By leveraging a serverless database service, you can focus on rapidly building application functionality rather than database administration.

Neil Beckett

Neil is an accomplished web, designer and developer with over 15 years of experience in creating and optimizing websites for small businesses and online entrepreneurs. Read full bio

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