Xeround the database service (more on them here) that is brining high levels of flexibility to cloud database users, is today rolling out availability on the Rackspace cloud. Formerly available on Amazon EC2 and Heroku, Xeround is moving in their ambition to support a large number of cloud infrastructure providers. Xeround is able to automatically scale up or down exactly to the needs of the application so that the database gets additional resources when it needs more size/throughput, and scales back down when it is underutilized.

Rather than paying for a pre-defined instance size, Xeround charges based on two usage metrics: Database Size and Data Transfer. For end users this should mean that the costs of running their database are tightly linked to the scale of the application it supports.

It might seem that Xeround is fighting a losing battle in light of the fact that they’re trying to offer a competing product to native DBaaS services on IaaS vendor’s own platforms, however Xeround believe they have a compelling proposition for a number of reasons;

  1. They offer MySQL native, other providers offer a sub segmented SQL offering in a limited soap/rest API
  2. They offer our service on multiple providers worldwide giving a vendor agnostic technology/solution
  3. They offer distributed and multi-tenancy
  4. The Xeround DB was designed and built from day one as virtual cloud DB, rather than using traditional services in a virtual container

At the same time as Xeround launches on Rackspace – they’re also rolling out their API which will allow developers to configure their applications to automatically create and manage multiple and discrete database instances in the cloud.

Xeround for Rackspace is initially only going to be offered in the US Rackspace data center.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

2 Comments
  • Ben – what do you mean by “native DBaaS”? Other than Amazon RDS, which is a very simplistic solution, which IaaS providers offer a native DBaaS? Rackspace doesn’t. And even many PaaS providers don’t offer it, Heroku for one (although they do have multiple 3rd-party offerings).

    • Hey Geva, Well there’s SQLAzure, but point taken. However, as IaaS continues to become more commoditized, I wonder if more IaaS vendors won’t look to DBaaS as a way to add some more value back in?

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.