The State of Open Source Databases

During his opening keynote, Peter Zaitsev, Founder and COE, Percona shared his perspective on The State of Open Source Databases during their Percona Live user conference in Austin, TX.

There have been huge changes for open source and open source databases as evidenced by recent events:

• Red Hat acquired by IBM for $34 billion

• Elastic and Pivotal IPOs

• Mulesoft and GitHub acquisitions

• MongoDB triples market to $7.7 billion

• Cloudera and Hortonworks merge

Open source software (OSS) is gaining traction rapidly as there are now 40 public companies versus five in 2014 and 20 in 2016.

Unicorns changing from open source licenses. MongoDB changes software license to SSPL.

Cloud and open source are frequently in the same discussion. Are cloud providers abusing OSS? Should software vendors be able to maintain a DBaaS monopoly? Are OSS users' interests being maintained?

Open Source is a strategic priority. 69% say open source is of strategic importance. Only open source databases are growing. PostgreSQL is the database of the year and the proprietary database migration database target of choice.

Reasons to adopt: cost savings (80%), avoid lock-in (62%), community (53%). Fears: lack of support (54%), bugs (41%), security and compliance (35%). 64% rely on self-support when running open source database technology.

Permissive licenses and the most preferred by respondents followed by source available license.

Relational databases are still popular. 50% of respondents to a Percona study are running database in the public cloud and 70% of those are on AWS. 38% are using DBaaS, and 74% of those on AWS. Amazon RDS is still twice as popular. 38% of companies with more than 5,000 employees are adopting multi-cloud.

DBaaS is winning hearts and minds because it provides convenience, agility, operational simplicity, multi-platform, multiple public clouds, cloud-native with Kubernetes (K8s) being the de-facto standard for operating the distributed data center.

Security, privacy, and compliance are all important to companies. More attention is being paid to all three due to laws, regulations, and the growth of serious data breaches. In 2019 there have already been 1,903 incidents versus 1,200 in 2018. Insider mistakes are the leading cause of these incidents. 30% of companies have sustained breaches in the past year, 60% in the past five years.

Key points:

• There's continued strong growth and adoption of open source databases
• There's increasing tension between users and vendors
• There are increasing concerns for cloud vendor lock-in
• There's increasing demand for security, simplicity, and scalability
• K8s is new hope for managing it all