We are well past the experimental stage with the cloud. It’s become mission-critical, and we have entered a stage where our applications and services need to take advantage of the globally distributed nature of the cloud and deliver on the expectations of our consumers.
Legacy relational databases are simply not built for the cloud. They are difficult to scale in this environment and costly to maintain their uptime. NoSQL stores were built to address legacy limitations; however, they fall short when it comes to providing consistent transactions. They are casually consistent. Some of the most successful global organizations have purpose-built databases that achieve the reliability of the relational store with the benefits of scale and global coverage that comes with the cloud. These databases are a new breed called Distributed SQL.
