In a recent blog post, Oracle introduced the MySQL Database Service in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The service is now available as a fully-managed service running on Oracle Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure.
The MySQL team at Oracle was responsible for the development of the MySQL Database Service and will also manage and support it. Since the MySQL Database Service is available as a managed service, customers do not need to provision, patch, update, backup or restore a MySQL instance - this is done automatically. Furthermore, they can quickly scale a MySQL instance, monitor resources, implement security best practices to meet regulatory requirements, access the MySQL databases via standard MySQL protocols, and automate any administrative task through the OCI web console, REST API, CLI, or DevOps tools.
According to the blog post, customers can benefit from leveraging MySQL Database Service as it is built on top of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as an ultra-secure native service – and thus leverages the benefits of a Cloud that is architected and designed to run mission-critical Enterprise workloads and databases. Furthermore, the same MySQL Server is used in the cloud, on-premises, and in hybrid deployments. Hence, customers can get maximum flexibility for their deployment strategy.
Various public cloud vendors have offered a managed MySQL database service on their platform for some time now. Microsoft, for instance, has a MySQL service on Azure generally available since 2018, and Google started offering the Google Cloud SQL as a fully-managed MySQL since 2013. Moreover, even earlier AWS had a MySQL offering called Amazon RDS, as of 2009.
Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
MySQL has been one of the most popular databases in the last 20 years, providing open-source based and cost-effective relational DB services. There was a lot of fear with Oracle getting MySQL, but so far, Oracle has been a good steward - and the largest contributor. Inexplicably from a product perspective - Oracle did not offer a cloud server - which is now history. Likely it can only be explained with Oracle rolling out its Gen2 for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Now it will be interesting to see how Oracle will do in an already clouded MySQL cloud space.... but all of this is good - as more competition makes for better and cheaper to use products.
Currently, the MySQL Service is available in multiple OCI regions, with more coming soon. Furthermore, the service is available through a 30-day free trial, and more details plus the guidance of the service is available in the documentation. Lastly, customers can use the cost estimator tool to calculate the costs of their workloads on a chosen MySQL instance configuration - and pricing details of the MySQL Database Service are available on the pricing page.