When using PaaS solutions or common cloud deployments, developers give up on stack ownership - How does this relate to choosing between MySQL sharding and MySQL partitioning solutions? Xeround's AVP of Ops and Solutions Itamar Haber investigates.

Scalability and elasticity are the trendiest words in the database arena these days – everybody scales, and everybody claims that only they scale the right way :) . There are several ways to scale a database. When evaluating a database solution, ask yourself how it scales and see if it scales in a way that would be optimal for the needs of your application.

An inherent capability of our distributed storage engine is the existence of multiple front-end nodes, which connect to our backend (which is also distributed on multiple nodes.) This multiple front-ends allow us to grow in throughput and number of connections beyond the limit of any single machine. This growth is not only unlimited, but extremely granular- in the sense that we can add just the right amount of extra resources required by the database, with no need for over-provisioning or being limited to Instance sizes, such as in the case of Amazon RDS. The automatic scalability is done in a way that is transparent to the application and with no downtime.