5 Best Cloud Databases

1, Amazon DynamoDB,
2, Google BigQuery,
3, Azure SQL Server,
4, Azure Cosmos DB,
5, Amazon Redshift

In 2012, Amazon released the first cloud database DynamoDB and changed the database landscape forever. Since then, cloud databases have experienced a meteoric rise in terms of adoption and innovation. As the whole Software development industry moves towards cloud-native development, cloud databases will be increasingly more important in the coming days. Gartner has predicted that by the end of 2022, 75% of all databases will move to the Cloud:Gartner Says the Future of the Database Market Is the CloudBy 2022, 75% of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform, with only 5% ever considered for…www.gartner.com

Why are cloud databases getting popular? In terms of database technology, the public cloud databases are not different from other SQL or NoSQL databases. However, the key selling point of the public cloud databases lies in database management and scaling.

In traditional SQL databases and many NoSQL databases, the application owners manage the databases, including replication, sharding, backup, restoration, scaling. But in cloud databases, the cloud provider manages the database.

Most cloud-native databases offer the following features along with the basic database management system:

Horizontal Scaling with managed partitioning/sharding.
Automatic Backup and restoration.
High availability with guaranteed SLA.
Cross data-center replication.
Support different consistency levels (Strong consistency, eventual consistency).
Cloud-Native.
Support multiple-model.
Move data to the edges with global distribution.
Serverless.
Planet scale.

Although the mainstream SQL and NoSQL databases are now trying to retrofit these features, they are not built from the ground-up for these needs.

In this article, I will rank the five most in-demand cloud-native database according to the following criteria:

Key Features
Popularity
Trending
Mainstream uses
Bright Future

1. Amazon DynamoDB

During the Christmas sale of December 2004, Amazon learned the hard way that the centralized, strong, consistent RDBMS could not handle Web-Scale application load. With a strict consistency Model, relational structure, and 2-phase commit, the traditional SQL databases could not provide the high availability and horizontal scalability Amazon was looking for. Amazon Engineering team developed a new NoSQL database DynamoDB and released their findings in their Dynamo paper in 2007. Amazon Dynamo paper played a crucial role in the later development of the NoSQL databases like Cassandra, Riak.

Although DynamoDB was used as the primary database of Amazon’s shopping cart application, it was only made public in 2012. Since then, DynmoDB is the most popular public cloud database and one of the most popular AWS services.

5 Key Features

It is a key-value and document-based NoSQL database.
It is a fully managed, multi-region, multi-master, highly available database.
It is designed for web-scale applications. It can handle more than 10 trillion requests per day and support peaks of more than 20 million requests per second.
DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) provides a fully managed in-memory cache.
With its multi-region replications, it offers single-digit millisecond response time at any scale.

When to Use DynamoDB

When AWS is the preferred public cloud provider.
When a key-value or document database is needed.
When hyper-scaling and high availability are preferred over consistency.
When fully managed public cloud database is preferred.
When Geospatial Data type is required.

When not to Use DynamoDB

When AWS is not the preferred public cloud provider.
As a primary database (OLTP) needing an ACID transactional guarantee.
When on-prem Database is preferred due to regulations, data-protection, or as a key business requirement.
When a columnar database or graph database is required.
When Distributed SQL (NewSQL) database is required.

Alternatives

Popularity:

Amazon DynamoDB is one of the most used hyper-scale cloud databases. It is also one of the most AWS services.

In recent years, it is getting fierce competition from open-source databases (e.g., Cassandra, MongoDB) and other public cloud databases (Azure Cosmos DB).

As Amazon is the leading public cloud provider, DynamoDB is still the most popular NoSQL database in the public cloud.

According to the popular database ranking site DB-Engines, it is the second most popular public cloud database, just behind Azure SQL database:

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020 has placed DynamoDB as the 11th most popular database for 2020. This is a feat considering that DynamoDB was the only public cloud database in that list:

Source: Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 2020

2. Google BigQuery

There are very few companies out there who have to deal with a massive dataset like Google. It is no wonder that Google is leading the BigData landscape in the 21st century with many novel ideas and innovations. At the beginning of this century, Google found the “One size fit for all” SQL databases are not good enough for Analytics workload. They developed a new Database, “Dremel,” for data-warehousing, i.e., handling a large volume of analytics Data. Google published a paper, “Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets,” in 2010 to make their findings public.

Later, Google made their internal Dremel Database public as BigQuery Database in 2011. Since then, it is the leading and the most innovative Database for data warehousing and analytics load. Google Cloud (GCP) has a strong presence in the Data Storage landscape, and BigQuery is playing a pivotal role there.