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Why You Need a Truly Serverless Database for Your Kubernetes Applications
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has revolutionized the way applications are deployed and managed by automating scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. A key technology in implementing IaC is Kubernetes, the orchestration and deployment manager of IaC systems. While Kubernetes has been great for the compute side of architectures, databases have been a challenge to absorb due to their need to persist data and be always available. Without the ability to fully contain all aspects of an application architecture inside the deployment management tier, kubernetes, a number of cost, scaling and performance challenges arise. To fully achieve the vision of IaC a truly serverless application needs a truly serverless database.
Key Values of Kubernetes for Applications
- Component-based Architecture for Federated Scaling: Kubernetes enables applications to separate components, allowing each to scale independently based on demand. This federated scaling ensures optimal resource utilization and cost efficiency.
- Automated Scaling: Kubernetes handles scaling dynamically, both up and down, responding to application needs without manual intervention.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Kubernetes defines and documents infrastructure as code, ensuring consistent deployments and simplifying operational workflows.
- Operational Automation: High availability (HA) and fault tolerance are automated. If a node or server fails, Kubernetes ensures continuity by spinning up replacements without human intervention.
While these principles drive Kubernetes' success, traditional databases often struggle to align with them, creating bottlenecks for modern applications.
Challenges for Databases Supporting Kubernetes Applications
Traditional databases differ significantly from the containerized components commonly deployed in Kubernetes clusters. Unlike ephemeral containerized services, databases must ensure long-term data persistence and maintain consistent state across applications and functions.
- Persistence of Data:Long-running database instances face downtime during maintenance or upgrades, risking data availability.
- Disjointed Scaling: Applications and databases operate on separate auto-scaling mechanisms, creating latency or resource mismatches during scaling events.
- Manual Provisioning: External databases require pre-provisioning ahead of application deployments as well as advanced knowledge of consumption patterns.
- Geographic Performance Limitations: Databases have fixed locations. If application containers are deployed across multiple locations, latency and consistency issues can arise.
- Data Consolidation for Analytics: Federated or sharded databases require data aggregation across multiple sources, increasing architectural complexity and latency for analytics.
- Connectivity: Traditional database connection methodologies have a thick and stateful protocol with a limited ability to scale. Often this leads to middleware or proxies being used for session pooling. External databases are typically unreachable from inside a kubernetes cluster, due to networking, and thus require an operator.
Why You Need a Truly Serverless Database
To fully embrace Kubernetes' deployment principles, your database must be as dynamic, automated, and efficient as the applications it supports. A truly serverless database streamlines deployments, scales effortlessly, and eliminates the complexity of manual configurations. By aligning with modern development practices like Database as Code (DBaC), it ensures seamless integration and strong data accuracy, enabling reliable operations at any scale. With cost-efficient, pay-as-you-go pricing and the ability to adapt instantly to changes, such a database redefines how data is managed in serverless environments.
- Database as Code (DBaC): Align database management with IaC principles. Define schema and schema changes directly in your repository alongside application code for unified deployments.
- Immediate Instantiation: The database is instantly available upon deployment, just like application code defined in IaC. Fauna’s DBaC allows for full automation of database and schema deployment.
- No Vendor-Specific Configurations: Eliminate the need for specialized configurations that add complexity, risk, and reliance on vendor-specific expertise. Fauna is an execution-ready DBaaS that requires no upfront provisioning or configuration.
- Focus on Code, Not Data Plumbing: Fauna provides a globally-distributed API for data access removing the need for operators or provisioning.
- Immediate Scaling: Scale seamlessly with no delays. Fauna’s multi-tenant clusters leverage shared infrastructure for cost efficiency without compromising performance.
- Strong Data Accuracy: Each containerized application component needs to operate independently and not need to reason through data consistency. Fauna’s strongly consistent transactions and server-side (database) functions ensure accuracy as app containers come and go.
- Dynamic Change Management: Fauna supports immediate, online schema changes, such as adding indexes or modifying schemas, without downtime or manual intervention.
- Geographic distributed users: Fauna’s offers three multi-active replicas over three separate locations, along with automatic routing, to enable consistent performance and the high availability.
- Cost Effective Pricing: Pay-As-You-Go (PaYG): Avoid over-provisioning and unnecessary capacity planning with Faun’s PaYG pricing where you pay only for the resources consumed.
Unlock the Full Potential of Kubernetes with a Truly Serverless Database
To support modern Kubernetes-based applications, a database must evolve beyond traditional limitations. A truly serverless database — one that offers instant availability, seamless scaling, and strong consistency — ensures your applications achieve maximum performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness.
By adopting a serverless database aligned with Kubernetes principles, your organization can streamline deployments, automate operations, and focus on innovation, not infrastructure. The future of application development is serverless — and so is the future of databases.
To learn how Fauna might be able to support your next project, explore the docs or schedule a demo to see it in action!
If you enjoyed our blog, and want to work on systems and challenges related to globally distributed systems, and serverless databases, Fauna is hiring
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