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Alibaba Cloud DBaaS to digitalise businesses

Alibaba is empowering DBaaS, as Cloud Computing has propelled the Internet-era by providing more computing capability and creative power.

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DQINDIA Online
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IIT Kharagpur

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, develops highly scalable platforms for cloud computing and data management.

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Alibaba Cloud is furthering its commitment to empowering customers and partners in a cloud native era. According to a recent industry research, 5% of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform by 2022.

To help Indian companies prepare for the future industry on cloud, Alibaba Cloud has brought its database products and real-life applications to the Indian market. Database products, such as POLARDB, have proven expertise, having supported the largest event of Alibaba Group, the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival.

With sectors such as e-commerce, gaming, media, and e-learning continuing to witness the growth, and rooted in managing and deriving insights from data intelligence, the need for robust costeffective databases will become even more necessary in India.

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What is DBaaS?

Database as a Service, or cloud-hosted databases, such as the Alibaba Cloud ApsaraDB, can free O&M personnel from many of the mundane tasks involved in keeping an enterprise database running. An ApsaraDB instance is a ready-to-use database, fully resilient and running on the fast SSD storage.

It runs on Alibaba Cloud’s own infrastructure so there’s no operating system or database product to install, patch, or secure. ApsaraDB is fully compatible with leading SQL and NoSQL products such as MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcache and more. You can pay by the hour or by the month.

As e-commerce, IoT, and mobile apps continue to proliferate, as well as the growth in remote working, the need for robust costeffective databases continues to grow. In July 2019, Alibaba Cloud released its next-generation cloud-native DBaaS service, POLARDB, worldwide.

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Like the rest of the ApsaraDB stable, POLARDB offers fully managed cloud-hosted database facilities, but with some very significant benefits around cost, performance, and resilience.

On POLARDB

POLARDB uses a clustered architecture, which needs no manual configuration. A POLARDB instance comprises two parts: the compute cluster which includes two and 16 database nodes, and distributed shared storage. When you set up a POLARDB compute cluster, two database nodes will be created: one for read/write and one for read only. A built-in proxy provides load balancing, again fully automatically, with no manual configuration required. Read requests are routed to the read-only instance, while write requests go to the read/write one.

You can have up to 15 read-only nodes in a cluster. Adding a new one takes around five minutes. POLARDB uses shared storage, which means that data is not replicated to each node in a cluster. There is only one copy of the data, which saves on storage costs.

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When you perform read and write operations on cloud disks, the operations are translated into the corresponding processes on the files stored in POLARDB Distributed Storage. This uses a flat design in which a linear address space is divided into slices, also called chunks.

Each chunk has three copies stored on different server nodes on different racks. This guarantees data reliability. To learn more, see Triplicate technology.

For high availability, POLARDB includes automatic failover in case a node fails. Nodes which are exhibiting problems can be easily restarted.

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POLARDB is fully compatible with MySQL v5.6 or 8.0, PostgreSQL and highly syntax-compatible with Oracle. Built-in snapshot facilities allow for extremely fast incremental backups. Point-in-time recovery is fully supported, via snapshot backups and redo log files.

POLARDB is fast. Read performance is up to 1 million queries per second (QPS) and write performance is up to 130,000 QPS. Computing power can be expanded to more than 1,000 processor cores.

Dr. Feifei Li, VP of Alibaba Group, President and Senior Fellow of Database Systems, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence said: “As businesses cater to users in a cloud-led internet age, the need for cloud-native databases that are elastic, available, intelligent, and secure will only continue to grow. We believe the value proposition of POLARDB and AnalyticDB will be extremely useful in the Indian context as more users come online and businesses cater to their needs.”

Alex Li, GM of Alibaba Cloud South Asia, added: “Given India’s business environment, it is essential for companies to have access to reliable, cost efficient but high-performance cloud computing infrastructure in order to scale. This is also critical in building up India’s future digital capabilities. With the local and global drive for Digital Transformation continues to be on top of organizations’ agenda, Alibaba Cloud hopes to equip the local businesses with the right technology to win the global race in the future.”

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