Optimizing your database for costs
We often see that customers migrate to cloud applications that rely on old databases. Sometimes, even cloud-native applications are developed using old patterns for data handling, mostly because companies have a history that needs to be retained and cannot be wiped out by a new database or application.
But an old and stratified database has its drawbacks: queries are slow and resource-intensive, so typically, the reaction is to add more resources and scale vertically, which is not what this section is about. You need to consider optimizing your database so that your application is leaner and faster, but mostly so that you will save money by downgrading the infrastructure. Database performance is commonly correlated to the following infrastructural parameters:
- Read/write input/output operations per second (IOPS)
- Disk throughput
- Disk latency
- CPU and RAM
- Queue depth
This is true not only when you are dealing with IaaS...
