The team behind the open-source distributed NoSQL database ScyllaDB has announced a new iteration of its managed offering, this time focusing on adapting workloads based on demand.
ScyllaDB X Cloud can scale up or down within a matter of minutes to meet actual usage, eliminating the need to overprovision for worst-case scenarios or deal with latency while waiting for autoscaling to occur. For example, the company says it only takes a few minutes to scale from 100K to 2M OPS.
According to the company, applications like retail or food delivery services often have peaks aligned with customer work hours and then a low baseline in the off-houses. “In this case, the peak loads are 3x the base and require 2-3x the resources. With ScyllaDB X Cloud, they can provision for the baseline and quickly scale in/out as needed to serve the peaks. They get the steady low latency they need without having to overprovision – paying for peak capacity 24/7 when it’s really only needed for 4 hours a day,” Tzach Livyatan, VP of product for ScyllaDB, wrote in a blog post.
ScyllaDB X Cloud also reaps the benefits of tablets, which were introduced last year in ScyllaDB Enterprise. Tablets distribute data by splitting tables into smaller logical pieces, or tablets, that are dynamically balanced across the cluster.
“ScyllaDB X Cloud lets you take full advantage of tablets’ elasticity. Scaling can be triggered automatically based on storage capacity (more on this below) or based on your knowledge of expected usage patterns. Moreover, as capacity expands and contracts, we’ll automatically optimize both node count and utilization,” Livyatan said.
Tablets also increase the maximum storage utilization that ScyllaDB can safely run at from 70% to 90%. This is because tablets can move data to new nodes faster, allowing the database to defer scaling until the last minute.
Support for mixed instance sizes supports the 90% storage utilization as well. For example, a company can start with tiny instances and then replace them with larger instances later if needed, rather than needing to add the same instance size again.
“Previously, we recommended adding nodes at 70% capacity. This was because node additions were unpredictable and slow — sometimes taking hours or days — and you risked running out of space. We’d send a soft alert at 50% and automatically add nodes at 70%. However, those big nodes often sat underutilized. With ScyllaDB X Cloud’s tablets architecture, we can safely target 90% utilization. That’s particularly helpful for teams with storage-bound workloads,” Livyatan said.
Other new features in ScyllaDB X Cloud include file-based streaming, dictionary-based compression, and a new “Flex Credit” pricing option, which combines the cost benefits of an annual commitment with the flexibility of on-demand pricing, ScyllaDB says.
