Percona Platform aims to boost open source database support
The open source database services provider is out with a new integrated offering that provides automated capabilities for organizations to manage and optimize database operations.
Open source database support vendor Percona on Tuesday made its namesake platform generally available. Percona Platform enables organizations to more easily manage databases on premises and in the cloud.
Since it was founded in 2006, Percona, based in Raleigh, N.C., has provided organizations with support services for open source database platforms, including MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB.
To date, Percona has largely delivered those services as a set of separate capabilities. With the Percona Platform, which has been in beta for the past year, the vendor has integrated its capabilities into a single platform that provides database software and management capabilities.
Percona Platform includes the new Advisors service, also now generally available, which integrates automated database optimization capabilities that were not present in the vendor's individual service offerings before.
Percona's move to create what he called an "intelligent open data platform" is a step in a positive direction for the vendor, said Omdia analyst Bradley Shimmin.
"The company's long history in supporting disparate open source projects within some highly demanding and complicated environments makes them the perfect partner for potential customers looking to reign in the complexities of deploying a heterogeneous, open source-savvy data stack to the cloud," Shimmin said.
Shimmin also said he sees potential for the Advisors service. With Advisors, Percona is in effect codifying its professional services experience as a service, enabling customers to select a deployment pattern that both matches their specific needs and has been tested in the field among Percona customers.
The company's long history in supporting disparate open source projects within some highly demanding and complicated environments makes them the perfect partner for potential customers looking to reign in the complexities of deploying a heterogeneous, open source-savvy data stack to the cloud.
Bradley ShimminAnalyst, Omdia
How Percona Platform aims to improve open source database management
Percona also provides its own distributions of popular open source databases, noted Donnie Berkholz, senior vice president of product. With open source-licensed software, individual vendors can take software from the community and build it as their own software distribution with specific configurations and optimization.
"A lot of people run Percona Server for MySQL, for MongoDB and for PostgreSQL," Berkholz said. "But the software side of the business was often disconnected from the service side."
Percona Platform is an attempt to bring together the open source database software, along with the managed services and monitoring, in a subscription-based approach.
The platform includes the vendor's Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) technology, which now uses the Advisors service. Advisors provide automated insights to help optimize database operations, for performance as well as security configuration.
Advisors isn't a point-in-time service that only runs once. Instead, it's a persistent service that can check database configuration at pre-configured intervals. The checks can identify weak passwords, misconfigured network ports for access and misused administrator credentials.
The Percona Platform is not a database as a service running on a single cloud.
Rather, Berkholz emphasized that the platform is a managed database that can be deployed on premises by an organization or in any cloud environment or across multiple clouds.
"Percona as a company isn't locked to a single cloud or a single database," he said. "We have the flexibility to help our customers run a database wherever they need to."
