Should Red Hat buy or build a database?

TL;DR — Yes. With data gravity influencing where workloads go, not having a database/ DBaaS offering will limit Red Hat’s success as more enterprises move to public cloud.

In response to twitter conversations with fellow industry analysts on this topic, I wrote up my thoughts on why Red Hat should build or buy a database/ DBaaS offering. Here are my reasons why Red Hat should; read this post for the entire article & context.

Data Gravity

Data Gravity is one of the most important factors influencing where workloads go. In a multi-cloud world, the amount of data in a particular cloud environment plays a larger role (among other factors such as TCO, relationships, discounts, etc) in bringing more workloads to that cloud environment. It is no surprise that AWS offers Snowmobile to literally haul data away from your datacenter to theirs.

It is important to note that only a very little percentage of enterprise workloads have been migrated to public clouds so far (conservative estimates place it at around 10%). As long as data resides within enterprise data centers, data gravity doesn’t matter much and Red Hat can get away with ‘included’ databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL etc. But when they move to cloud, not so much. Here is why.

When a Red Hat customer starts to move their workloads to a public cloud environment, it is most likely that they will replicate their existing environment on the cloud (aka Lift and Shift). So far, Red Hat has got nothing to lose. But once they start re-designing/ re-architecting to leverage cloud-based services or start designing cloud-native applications, they will most likely use cloud-based offerings such as SQL Azure/ AWS RDS or Azure CosmosDB/ AWS DynamoDB for their database needs. They might continue running compute on Red Hat offerings (either RHEL on VMs, or on OpenShift), but data will be out of Red Hat offerings. As more data move to such public cloud database services, fewer reasons for compute to stay on Red Hat offerings.

Missing/ Incomplete piece in Support

Red Hat currently includes databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. with RHEL. For such databases, the support provided by Red Hat only includes packaging, installation, and minimal configuration, but no troubleshooting of database itself. It also doesn’t test advanced configurations with some of the supported databases (such as clustering with MongoDB). It is also not clear what type of support does Red Hat provides for databases that are included with RHEL images on AWS/ Azure.

When compared with the kind of support that Red Hat provides for its other portfolio offerings such as RHEL/ RHEV, storage, middleware, it is clear that support for databases is definitely a missing/ incomplete piece in their support offerings.

What Users Want

Multiple user reports/ surveys on cloud adoption patterns (OpenStack User Survey, State of Cloud, Stage of Modern Applications) show the importance and growth of DBaaS services, with MySQL and MongoDB leading in adoption. With more workloads moving to cloud/ cloud-native applications getting developed, this pattern is only expected to continue — it is Red Hat’s best interest to capture this opportunity.

What do you think?