Preface
Alibaba Cloud released PolarDB in September 2017, drawing on Alibaba Group's database engineering experience and the infrastructure that handles Double 11 traffic spikes—one of the highest-throughput transaction events in the world.
How PolarDB works
PolarDB decouples compute from storage. Instead of binding CPU, memory, and disk into a single machine, PolarDB runs compute nodes on cloud-native Kubernetes and connects them to a shared storage layer. This architecture removes the scaling limits of traditional databases:
Scale compute in minutes — add or remove compute capacity without data migration or prolonged downtime
Flexible reconfiguration — change instance specs on demand to match workload changes
Ultra-high concurrency — the shared storage layer serves concurrent reads across multiple nodes without contention
Reliability and security
PolarDB provides enterprise-grade high availability. If a primary node fails, PolarDB completes a switchover to a read-only node within 10 seconds—with no manual intervention required.
For data protection, PolarDB encrypts data at rest and data in transit, meeting enterprise compliance requirements.
Adoption and recognition
In 2020, PolarDB received the first prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award. Today, tens of thousands of production instances across thousands of customers run on PolarDB, spanning public services, energy, carriers, finance, and Internet enterprises. PolarDB is one of the fastest-growing databases on Alibaba Cloud.