MariaDB on the cloud

TL;DR

AWS RDS for MariaDB

• Versions: up to 11.8 LTS (incl. VECTOR), plus 11.4 / 10.11 LTS; 12.3 still in Preview (lags upstream ~6–12 months)
• ✅ Mature, Multi-AZ, IAM/CloudWatch integration, Graviton instances (db.r7g)
• ❌ No ColumnStore / Xpand (but VECTOR shipped with 11.8 — GA on RDS since 2025-08)
• Tip: db.t4g.micro for dev (~$15/mo), enable Performance Insights

Aliyun RDS for MariaDB

• Versions: 10.3 / 10.5 (slow to update)
• ✅ Cheap, fast inside China
• ❌ Old versions
• For new projects, consider PolarDB for MySQL instead — better compatibility and perf

Tencent TencentDB for MariaDB

• "TDSQL for MariaDB" is actually based on a heavily-modified MariaDB 5.7 fork — test compatibility before committing
• Good for: financial, strong-consistency, sharded workloads
• For vanilla MariaDB, their MySQL line is closer to upstream

Azure Database for MariaDB

MariaDB SkySQL

• Run by MariaDB plc, the official company
• ✅ Only managed offering with full enterprise feature set — ColumnStore, Xpand, latest VECTOR
• ❌ Expensive; limited regions (mainly select AWS / GCP regions)

Pre-launch checklist

1. Version is 11.4 LTS or newer
2. Default engine is InnoDB (no stray MyISAM)
3. Charset utf8mb4, collation utf8mb4_unicode_ci (not _general_ci)
4. Backups: PITR on, restore validated
5. Multi-AZ for prod
6. innodb_buffer_pool_size ≈ 60–70% of RAM
7. Slow query log on, threshold 1s
8. TLS enforced from clients
9. server_audit plugin enabled if you need compliance

Migrating from cloud MySQL

• MySQL 5.7 → MariaDB 10.5+ — usually smooth
• MySQL 8.0 → MariaDB 11.x — the branches have diverged on JSON, CTE, default collation, auth plugins. Test before switching.