DataStax Managed Cloud made available on Microsoft Azure as demand for hybrid and multi-cloud rises

Google Cloud Platform will be next, the company says

DataStax Managed Cloud (DMC), the database as a service (DbaaS) offering previously only available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), has now been ported to Microsoft's Azure IaaS public cloud.

DMC was first launched on AWS in early in 2017 following the acquisition by DataStax of DataScale, a provider of cloud-based management services for data infrastructure.

The service includes DataStax Enterprise, the company's packaging of the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, with add-ons such as search, analytics, tooling and monitoring, onboarding and provisioning services for hybrid cloud architectures, back up and replication, and proactive intervention when problems are detected. There are service guarantees for always-on availability.

DataStax describes the service as a managed data layer on which enterprise applications can be built.

"Our goal is to empower our customers with an always-on data layer to fit their hybrid cloud architectures. Plus, we want to make it much easier and faster for them to build cloud ready applications for today's 'right-now' economy," Martin van Ryswyk, VP of engineering at DataStax, told Computing.

DMC is intended primarily for enterprises that run hybrid- or multi-cloud environments, that have real-time data needs but which may lack operational staff or prefer to hand administration over to a third party for other reasons.

"They would like to use the same database on-prem as in the cloud - hybrid- or multi-cloud - for many reasons: to avoid cloud vendor lock-in; to take advantage of investment in existing data centres; and because of the geographic location of data centres as different public clouds have presence where it's needed," van Ryswyk said.

"However, they would still like the ease of use and hands-off operations that public cloud databases provide. DMC provides the best of both worlds. Also, our enterprise customers like the control and security of a single tenant database."

The company also plans to make DMC available on the Google Cloud Platform. While there are differences in the way the big public providers operate, van Ryswyk said the order of the rollout was mostly to do with customer demand.

"There are many common attributes across public clouds, but different vendors also have unique attributes. For instance how networking is configured between regions," he said.

"We need to automate the configuration - and recovery in case of errors - and this requires some vendor-specific code and testing. Also, each vendor has different instance types so we need to profile our database on the different types so we can advise customers on the best implementation."

The company declined to disclose the pricing model of the service.

In a statement John Chirapurath, general manager of data platform marketing at Microsoft said: "As a result of our collaboration with DataStax, our mutual customers will benefit from the enhanced data layer and cloud infrastructure for contextual, always-on and scalable applications."

DataStax is not the only database vendor offering a 'white glove' cloud service. EnterpriseDB's Dave Page recently spoke to Computing about his company's response to the rising demand for hybrid cloud, EDB Ark.