by Databricks Staff
For teams building AI applications today, serverless databases are the new baseline. AI teams need a database that scales instantly with demand, idles at near-zero cost and stays close to enterprise data. Otherwise, they risk paying for unused infrastructure, creating governance, security and compliance challenges and spending valuable time on database management.
A serverless database is a cloud database that automatically scales compute and storage based on demand, billing for actual usage and reducing capacity planning and infrastructure management. In a serverless model, servers are used but are fully managed by a cloud service provider or vendor. In the most advanced systems, compute and storage are decoupled, so each scales independently and you pay only for what each layer uses.
Think of database management as a progression:
Not every product labeled "serverless" is architecturally serverless or separates compute and storage. Some are simply autoscaling clusters with usage-based billing layered on top. Understanding the difference is important when evaluating options.
