App development stacks have been improving so rapidly and effectively that today there are a number of easy, straightforward paths to push code to production, on the cloud platform of your choice. But what use are applications without the data that users interact with? Persistent data is such an indispensable piece of the IT puzzle that it’s perhaps the reason the other pieces even exist.
Enter cloud and internet scale requirements, essentially mandating that back-end services must be independently scalable / modular subsystems to succeed. Traditionally, this requirement has been difficult in the extreme for stateful systems. No doubt, database as-a-service (DBaaS) has made provisioning, operations, and security easier. But as anyone who has tried to run databases on Kubernetes will tell you: auto scaling databases, especially ones that are easy for developers to use, remain out of reach for mere mortals.