One of the world's most popular open-source relational database management systems, widely offered as a fully managed cloud service. Like a well-organized digital filing cabinet that millions of websites rely on, MySQL stores structured data in tables with rows and columns and uses SQL (Structured Query Language) for data manipulation. AWS offers Amazon RDS for MySQL and Aurora MySQL, Azure provides Azure Database for MySQL, GCP has Cloud SQL for MySQL, and OCI offers MySQL Database Service (notably, Oracle acquired MySQL and provides the only cloud-native MySQL HeatWave service with integrated analytics).
An e-commerce startup uses managed MySQL to store their product catalog, customer accounts, and order history. The managed service handles automatic backups every night, replicates data across availability zones for high availability, scales storage automatically as the product catalog grows, and applies security patches without any downtime — letting the small team focus on building features instead of database administration.
All four clouds offer managed MySQL where the provider handles provisioning, backups, patching, and high availability. AWS, Azure, and GCP primarily offer managed MySQL engines (plus AWS Aurora as a MySQL-compatible alternative). OCI offers a managed MySQL service and also provides MySQL HeatWave, which adds an integrated in-memory analytics accelerator for MySQL workloads.
Explore real-world architectures from our community that use MySQL: