On March 31, 2020 MariaDB Corporation officially broke the news about a technology partnership with Google Cloud. The collaboration is created to make available SkySQL, a cloud hosted version of MariaDB, on Google Cloud Platform.

The SkySQL database management system managed by MariaDB’s creators is the pilot database-as-a-service (DBaaS) to unleash the potential of MariaDB Platform for transactions, analytics or both to add value with the cloud-native architecture supported from the source and the engineers who created the database. The strategic partnership offers deeper product integration and enables a go-to-market relationship to respond more effectively to joint customers of Google and MariaDB.

Apart from offering access to MariaDB on the GCP starting a USD 0.45 per hour, SkySQL gives competition to services such as Google Cloud SQL and Amazon RDS, as these managed database solutions often do not match up with the latest release of MySQL or MariaDB.

For example these platforms only support up to MariaDB 10.3 whereas the latest version is MariaDB 10.4.12.

Explore SkySQL

SkySQL cloud database executes highly developed architecture and leverages the potential of Kubernetes for container orchestration. Developed on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), SkySQL practices a modern approach to deal with critically important capabilities for all. The strategic partnership empowers close functioning relationship between Google Cloud, GKE engineers and MariaDB to add value to SkySQL to operate on GCP.

Google Cloud’s Director Partnerships, Manvinder Singh stated, “We’re proud to partner with MariaDB and to launch SkySQL on Google Cloud.” He added, “Organizations are increasingly looking to the cloud to store and manage their data. Bringing SkySQL to Google Cloud gives customers an additional cloud-native and open source-based database, and enables them to leverage the openness, functionality and performance of MariaDB’s relational database on Google Cloud’s global and trusted infrastructure.”

Kevin Farley, Director, Strategic Alliances at MariaDB Corporation mentioned that they were super excited about collaborating with Google Cloud to extend their presence along with the all new SkySQL cloud database. He added, “With Kubernetes being the primary architecture element of SkySQL, we choose Google Cloud for the debut. As partnering with Google Cloud who has the undisputed expertise on Kubernetes and a strong supporter of open source gives us an exclusive opportunity to offer best-of-breed solutions.”