SurrealDB has unfurled a beta instance of managed cloud service based on its namesake open-source distributed document-graph database that supports SQL queries.
Fresh off raising $20 million in additional funding, Surreal Cloud will provide IT organizations with an alternative to managing instances of the databases themselves.
SurrealDB CEO Tobie Morgan Hitchcock said SurrealDB provides organizations with an in-memory multimodal database that can be used to drive everything from time-series applications to machine learning models.
Written in the RUST programming language and designed to scale out to process terabytes of data, the SurrealDB enables IT teams to reduce the total cost of IT by eliminating the need to deploy a separate database for different classes of applications.
It’s not clear to what degree organizations are looking to deploy multimodal databases, but IT teams are finding that each new class of application requires some type of underlying data store format that needs to be supported. A multimodal database creates an opportunity to reduce the IT management overhead that IT teams would otherwise encounter. Surreal Cloud promises to streamline those tasks even further by providing access to a fully managed database service that is continuously updated.
There are, of course, no shortage of options when it comes to databases. Many modern applications are now being built on top of document databases often selected by developers. However, once an application is deployed in a production environment, responsibility for managing those databases usually falls to a database administrator or a DevOps team.
Regardless of how a database is managed, the number of applications being deployed is expected to exponentially increase thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) that promise to make it easier for developers to write code faster. Supporting all those applications using different types of databases isn’t likely to be feasible, given all the additional expertise that might be required. Ultimately, IT teams would look to limit the number of types of databases that need to be supported, if for no other reason than reducing the number of vendors they might have to engage.
Just how large the open-source community that supports SurrealDB is unknown, but as databases continue to evolve, the open-source community is exerting more influence. Many developers are also generally wary of building applications that might not ever gain any traction using proprietary databases they need to first license. The issue, as always, is finding a way to navigate the handoff of a database to an IT team as developers move on to their next project.
In the meantime, IT teams might also want to take a good look at the stateful applications they currently support using multiple types of databases. There’s more than likely plenty of opportunity to consolidate those databases in a way that should streamline the management of data while simultaneously reducing costs. The challenge, of course, is getting the leadership of the IT organization to prioritize those efforts when there are so many new applications still waiting to be built and deployed.
