A relational database is hosted on a single VM in a public cloud. As the load on the database is predicted to increase, the cloud administrator is tasked with improving the database service with…

Migrating to a serverless database service offers inherent automatic scalability for both compute and storage resources, robust automation for patching and backups, and is designed to operate with high availability, effectively addressing the requirements for scalability, automation, and minimal downtime. These services abstract away infrastructure management, allowing the database to scale seamlessly under varying loads.

Migrating only the storage to a scalable block store enhances storage scalability and performance but does not address the compute scalability or the comprehensive automation benefits provided by a fully managed database service.

Configuring a VM to automatically scale up (vertical scaling) often involves downtime during resizing operations and does not offer the same level of granular, automatic scaling for relational databases that a dedicated serverless database service provides.

Increasing the IOPS of the database storage disk only improves disk performance, which is a single aspect of scalability, and does not provide comprehensive compute scalability or the broad automation features of a managed database service.