CenturyLink Outlines DBaaS Strategy

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Following its acquisition of Orchestrate, a provider of a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offering based on a NoSQL database, CenturyLink is letting it be known that its ambitions now go well beyond providing hosting and telecommunications services.

Dave Shacochis, vice president of the cloud platform at CenturyLink, says that via RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs), organizations of all sizes can invoke an Orchestrate DBaaS that is based on a key/value store database. As a result, IT organizations can actually layer multiple types of database formats on top of Orchestrate, including graph databases and document databases.

Orchestrate already runs on the CenturyLink cloud environment. The acquisition of Orchestrate follows a related acquisition of Cognilytics, a provider of a predicative analytics service and the delivery of Hadoop as a service in the cloud.

While IT operations teams are fairly familiar with CenturyLink, Shacochis says the cloud service provider is now making a concerted effort to woo application developers by making all its cloud resources programmatically accessible via REST APIs. The end result, says Shacochis, will be an extensive set of self-service capabilities that developers can invoke on demand.

The degree to which CenturyLink can slug it out with much larger cloud service providers for the hearts and minds of developers remains to be seen. At this point, there’s no shortage of DBaaS options in the cloud. But the days of being merely a provider of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings are coming to a close as cloud service providers of all types and sizes start moving up the application stack to eventually provide an entire data warehouse environment in the cloud.

In fact, Shacochis notes that as IT organizations rely more on databases running in the cloud, the entire process of managing those databases shifts to the cloud service provider. That shift eliminates the need for dedicated database administrators, because the database is now essentially a managed service delivered by the cloud service provider.

Even though usage of DBaaS is still relatively nascent, it’s already becoming clear that the benefits of using such services go way beyond the terms and conditions that describe how database software is delivered.