Tessell's journey: How and why it all started?

In the last few decades, tech organizations, both enterprises and startups, have adopted the cloud journey. It is, then, no surprise that cloud has become the de-facto infrastructure for organizations of all sizes. As part of the cloud adoption journey, the need for a fully-managed infrastructure for running and managing high-performance relational database workloads on the cloud has become indispensable. Today's database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solutions let you manage and run your databases on the cloud but come with multifold challenges. The biggest challenge is that you end up paying exorbitant prices for running your high-performance database workloads on the cloud.

Each IT business is unique and so are the database requirements for each business. Traditional or cloud-defining enterprises turn to DBaaS to find a solution that helps them automate administrative tasks while also meeting the demands of their high-performance databases. Enterprises also need a robust security architecture to mitigate threats and protect sensitive customer data, ensure business continuity without any data loss, share data securely, and get flexible deployment options. Cloud-born startups, on the other hand, look for a DBaaS solution that is easy-to-use, agile in terms of quickly spinning up databases, and cost-effective to bring down the capital; all this with a minimal learning curve in adopting the technology.

Though there are umpteen DBaaS solutions in the market today, not a single solution addresses the core challenges of running relational database workloads on the cloud. Nor does any solution offer a fully-managed DBaaS that you can customize to meet the demands of both large enterprises and startups alike. With a strong conviction to address these challenges and convert them into strengths, the founders of Tessell, with over 50+ years of collective experience in databases and data management, decided to leverage their pedigree to reimagine a fully-managed cloud DBaaS from scratch. Thus, Tessell was born.

Why the term 'Tessell' and what it means?

Etymologically, Tessell is derived from the term 'Tessellation'. Tessellation means arranging various shapes and objects in a repetitive manner, forming beautiful patterns without any gaps or overlaps. The concept of tessellation is used widely in the fields of arts and science. Going by this definition, Tessell aims to help enterprises manage their data in the cloud in an organized and efficient way, thereby bringing the art and science of 'tessellation' to cloud data management. The 'science' is driven by technology that is used to make databases on the cloud more robust, secure, high-performance, and affordable. The 'art' focuses on breaking the shackles of complexity around cloud data management and­­­ making the experience consumer-grade, intuitive, and user-friendly.

But how does Tessell disrupt existing DBaaS in the market?

The key differentiation for Tessell in the DBaaS space is that it breaks away from an IOPS-based pricing model and offers a highly-performant, highly durable, cloud infrastructure for your databases at fractional costs.

And how does Tessell do this? A simple answer is, exactly how Snowflake disrupted the data warehouse industry a decade back. By decoupling compute from storage in the cost and resource-heavy traditional data warehouse model, Snowflake offered the data warehouse customers what they really wanted - transparent scaling and a pay-per-usage pricing model. Customers now pay separately for the storage that they consume and the compute resources they use to execute requests. Similarly, Tessell disrupts the cloud DBaaS space by internally segregating primary storage, which is the NVMe local storage, from the secondary storage, which is the EBS cloud volume. While the NVMe-based primary storage is used to handle application workloads, the EBS volume-based secondary storage can be provisioned only on-demand to take backups, and snapshots and manage other secondary needs. By bringing durability and persistence to the ephemeral, high-performance NVMe storage, Tessell offers 10x cloud database performance at 7x lower costs.

Tessell's promise is not limited to improved database performance and cost. Today's cloud database management services fail to offer a one-place shop for an end-to-end seamless data management experience. As a result, organizations end up using siloed apps to address their various data management needs, and DBAs are often mired with the day-to-day tasks of handling database operations. Tessell innovatively breaks these silos with a broad spectrum of enterprise-grade in-built apps. You get a unified, delightful data management experience for browsing data catalogs, performing governance activities, sharing data, data masking, analyzing spends, generating reports, and more. For instance, with the provisioning app, you can quickly provision any database engine on your choice of cloud, without any dependency on a DBA. Additionally, you can discover your data efficiently in a Netflix-like fashion, clone, import, or download data in any format across multiple cloud regions, using the simple and elegant data browsing and consumption apps. As Sanjay Singh, an early beta prospect of Tessell, puts it 'We are in the process of transitioning the traditional DBA roles into DBE (Database Engineering) in order to cut down on the mundane, repetitive tasks and shift focus on activities that have a direct business impact. We are exploring Tessell for a silo-free data management experience that lets us automate data management tasks so that the database administrators can spend less time on mired, manual tasks.'

Data sharing never got this easy! Tessell easily lets you create a Data Access Policy (DAP) to securely share data with other users. You can clearly definewhattype of data you want to share, withwhomyou want to share the data,whereor in which region you want to share the data, andwhenyou want to share the data. With this, organizations can be assured of maximum protection and security of data.

However, learning or adapting to a new technology or a product can be overwhelming. But Tessell liberates you of any such challenges with its consumer-grade user interface which makes the entire user experience stress-free, simple, and convenient. The guided tours at every step of the way on the UI help you come up to speed with the product in no time. Not just the UI, developers can use API code to call the service at the click of a button in Tessell, aggregating to a smooth onboarding experience. So here's a product that is quick to adapt, easy to implement, and needs a minimal learning curve.

Tessell's vision is simple yet significant! By making cloud database management easy, affordable, and highly efficient for all, Tessell aims to eradicate complexities and cut down the time that enterprises spend on manual tasks. This, in turn, empowers businesses to reallocate time, re-investing in their customers and business.