Percona announces general availability of the Percona Platform (Image Credit: Percona)At Percona Live, Percona has announced the general availability of the Percona Platform. Percona describes it as “A unified experience for developers and database administrators to monitor, manage, secure, and optimize database environments and supports private database as-a-service functionality.”

Donnie Berkholz, Senior Vice President Product at Percona (Image Credit: Twitter)
Donnie Berkholz, Senior Vice President Product at Percona

Donnie Berkholz, Senior Vice President of Product at Percona, said, “Percona Platform brings the experience and expertise that we have built up over the years and puts it in the hands of developers and database administrators to use. It includes AI-powered recommendations that help users improve performance, management and security, as well as making it easier to scale up and manage their instances over time.

“With Percona Platform, we thought about how to improve the experience for developers and DBAs around running their data workloads, and how to help people achieve their goals faster around managing databases as part of their overall approach.”

What is the Percona Platform?

The quick answer is that it is a platform to support MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB databases. It delivers solutions across three tiers: management, data and runtime. It can also be run on the cloud platform of your choice, Azure, GCP, AWS, etc or on-premises. Importantly, it will support any and all combinations of those platforms at the same time. That is important as it means it is a single solution to handle customers’ entire database estate.

Across the multiple tiers, it supports management, backup, security and high availability. It also uses automation to deliver help to customers. The automation is called Percona Advisors and it runs within the Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) tool. How many advisors you have access to depends on your level of engagement with Percona. Importantly, there are advisors at all levels from basic to standard and premium.

While some of the features are database specific, Percona has chosen to deliver many features in a way that enables them to run across all three databases it supports. That means that the learning curve is lower. It also means that support teams can quickly improve their ability to respond to incidents rather than waiting for a database specialist.

Percona announces general availability of the Percona Platform (Image Credit: Percona)

The features listed in the press release are:

  • Percona Portal: Access to all Percona services and product expertise through one unified online portal, covering multiple databases with enterprise-level features including backup, security, management, optimization and more
  • Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM): A database management product that is fully open source itself, allowing developers and DBAs to streamline their management tasks across multiple platforms from one place
  • New range of Advisors: Automated insights that ensure user databases are performing at their best, including security management, configuration and performance improvements
  • Private DBaaS Technical Preview: This will support companies deploying their own DBaaS internally using open source database distributions, Percona management tool PMM and Kubernetes operators for MySQL and PostgreSQL. It will also support the same approach for MongoDB. This enables users to easily provision and manage database instances on a self-service basis across development and testing instances, improving the experience for developers
  • Percona Account: Simplified user account management for all Percona products and services under one account

Enterprise Times: What does this mean?

Organisations are not just awash with data, they are awash with databases that are used by IT and users alike. The cloud makes it very easy to stand up a database instance. The result is that many organisations have no idea how many instances they have or even where they have them.

What Percona is doing here is delivering a single point of management. Importantly, that management is multi-cloud and on-premises. It means that organisations can search for, identify and begin to manage that explosion of database instances.

Another point to note is that Percona is keeping to its open-source position. All the tools are available to everyone to get started and deliver the ability to manage their databases. Not unreasonably, it is providing more advisors to those on paid levels but that doesn’t detract from this being fully featured at all levels. It’s a good move and one that avoids the common open-source problem of missing features for community editions.

There is more to come for the Percona Platform. The company says it will continue to add more advisors based on customer demand. It is also announcing a tech preview of its Private Database as a Service (DBaaS) solution. What it is not doing is saying when that will be in the product.

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