---
summary: Managed, highly available MariaDB with self-service databases and accounts.
title: Overview
path: overview
status: published
---

# Overview

Scuttle is managed MariaDB. You get databases and database accounts on a highly available cluster, reachable through one TLS endpoint per cluster, and you create them yourself through the console or the API. ScaiLabs runs the servers, the replication, the failover, the backups and the upgrades.

## What you get

Each cluster is a MariaDB Galera cluster: every committed transaction is replicated synchronously before the commit returns, so a node failure does not lose committed data. You connect to a single endpoint such as `db.nlwest-std.scuttle.scailabs.ai:3306`. Any MySQL or MariaDB client works; there is no SDK to install.

## How it is organised

Your organisation is a **tenant**. Inside it you create **realms** — one per team or product — and hand out roles on them. Databases and accounts live in a realm, and their names carry the tenant and realm as a prefix, for example `acme_shop_orders`. That prefix is what keeps tenants apart on a shared cluster. See [Tenants, realms and names](/docs/scuttle/concepts/tenancy).

## Regions and service levels

A cluster is one region at one service level, named `<region>-<level>`. At launch there are two: `nlwest-std` and `nlsouth-std`, both in the Netherlands. `std` is a shared cluster. Your databases are served from the region you chose. Backups are encrypted and stored in the other region, also in the Netherlands, so losing one region never takes a database and its backups at once. You can restore any moment of the last 14 days — see [The console](/docs/scuttle/using/console#backups).

## When to use it

Use Scuttle for transactional application databases that need high availability without running MariaDB yourself. It is not the right fit if you need server-level privileges, MyISAM tables, or the event scheduler — read [Limitations](/docs/scuttle/concepts/limitations) before you migrate.