Introducing TiDB Serverless: Now Generally Available as a Fully-Managed Cloud Service

Eight years ago, we embarked on an ambitious journey to construct an unparalleled distributed relational database. We aimed to redefine how developers and enterprises manage data, addressing the growing needs for scalability, flexibility, and performance. Guided by our company mission to empower developers and enterprises with speed, agility, and scale, our target was clear: to develop the scalable relational database while providing the best user experience.

Last November, we reached a significant milestone in our journey with the release of TiDB Serverless in Public Beta. Since then, we’ve engaged tens of thousands of users and collected invaluable feedback, tirelessly refining our product based on these insights.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of TiDB Serverless—the realization of our ambition to revolutionize database management. With this fully-managed DBaaS officially GA, we deliver a powerful and economical data management solution that auto-scales with your needs, eliminating upfront sizing, rebalancing, and idle resources. As a result, TiDB Serverless can empower global businesses and developers in an unprecedented manner.

Below are the key features and capabilities this fully-managed DBaaS offers developers:

Simplify database operations like never before

We’ve reinvented database operations to make them simpler than ever. With TiDB Serverless:

• Routine tasks—such as provisioning, management, and maintenance—are eliminated.
• Complex tasks—such as high-availability configurations and scaling—are seamlessly automated.
• Enjoy downtime-free automatic upgrades and daily backups with point-in-time recovery (PiTR).
• Our OpenAI-powered TiDB Bot assists you with best practices.

Cost-efficient usage with auto elasticity

TiDB Serverless’ pay-as-you-go platform ensures you only pay for what you use under all circumstances. You’ll be able to:

• Effortlessly handle demand spikes with automatic scalability, right down to zero when idle.
• Say goodbye to picking server sizes, over-provisioning, and paying for unused capacity.
• Set monthly resource limits to avoid any unexpected costs.
• Understand your monthly bill with a transparent pricing model.

Maximize development velocity

From prototype to production, TiDB Serverless can enhance your development speed:

• Start instantly for free with a MySQL-compatible database.
• Integrate with MySQL’s rich ecosystem of tools, ORMs, and drivers.
• Achieve real-time insights by running hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) concurrently without a separate system.
• Utilize AI-enhanced capabilities, such as Chat2Query, to generate and run SQL queries from natural language.
• Manage and automate operations with the TiDB Cloud Admin API, TiCloud CLI or Terraform.

Security and compliance by default

TiDB Serverless makes your data security, privacy, and compliance a top priority:

• TiDB Serverless achieved SOC 2 Type II certification. It also conforms to industry standards in security, availability, data processing integrity, and confidentiality.
• Meets privacy and compliance standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and more by default.
• TLS Connections are always required when accessing serverless clusters.
• Roles-based access control allows precise regulation of data access.
• Multi-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security.
• Comprehensive logging and monitoring deliver clear visibility and accountability.

How companies are already using TiDB Serverless

Chaintool, a Web3 technology company, builds infrastructure to support blockchain transactional data. The company then utilizes this data to develop on-chain risk management solutions. They deploy their off-chain APIs on TiDB Serverless. By doing away with the manual and operational challenges associated with traditional database solutions, TiDB Serverless has allowed them to focus on building their data platform for Web3 developers and analysts.

Over the past six months, TiDB Serverless provided Chaintool with numerous advantages that significantly improved their business operations. These advantages include:

• Easier onboarding and collaboration: The ease of onboarding offered by the platform facilitated the involvement of more partners in the project. This lowered collaboration and communication expenses and guaranteed agile project development.
• Optimized costs: As the company’s project expanded and the business requirements evolved, TiDB Serverless’s usage-based pricing significantly reduced cost while accommodating agile and fluctuating demands and project progress. 
• Future-ready database: TiDB Serverless offers both elastic scalability and mixed workload processing capabilities. This enables it to support Chaintool’s growing data storage requirements while ensuring a future-ready solution. 

“TiDB Serverless significantly reduced our time to market with much lower cost in the competitive Web3 world” says Yi Zhang, founder, CEO, and acting CTO of Chaintool. “It’s not only intuitive to use, but its built-in row-based and columnar storage also allows us to process both transactional and analytical workloads in a single database.”

Chaintool plans to explore more TiDB Serverless use cases in the near future, including potential use of TiFlash.

Get started with TiDB Serverless

As we move forward, we remain committed to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in data management and app development. We also want to help you navigate an ever-evolving digital landscape with ease and confidence. The GA of TiDB Serverless is a milestone to this commitment, and yet, it is merely the beginning of what we aim to achieve.

Our continuing journey will be fueled by your feedback and our drive for innovation. We look forward to collaborating with you to further refine our product.

Discover how TiDB Serverless can revolutionize your data management and app development by spinning up a free cluster instantly without a credit card.