White Paper. Deploying and Provisioning Databases in the Cloud: How Tesora s Database as a Service (DBaaS) Platform is Transforming Enterprise IT

Transcription

1 White Paper Deploying and Provisioning Databases in the Cloud: How Tesora s Database as a Service (DBaaS) Platform is Transforming Enterprise IT

2 When IT Departments Can t Deliver, People Go Elsewhere Over the last few years the cloud has brought sweeping changes in the database landscape, and many IT departments are struggling to keep up. With cloud providers like Amazon, developers are no longer beholden to IT when they need a database for their application. Rather than waiting weeks or months, developers can get self-service access to a database at a moment s notice while the cloud provider manages it behind the scenes. But when people go around the IT organization to take advantage of outside services, they expose the enterprise in ways that can make a CIO cringe. They are probably not adhering to enterprise best practices and standards for data retention, data privacy, encryption and backups. They may be unaware of (or ignoring) statutory requirements. Most of the time they simply use the cloud provider s default settings, disregarding controls that are carefully spelled out in corporate policies and are lost when people circumvent IT. In addition to the legal and regulatory risks, there are other reasons why this shadow IT is a poor idea. Most enterprises do not want to be beholden to a behemoth that is in control of their data and can dictate the terms of service particularly when the cloud provider s internal practices are often opaque. In addition, IT departments that have invested in infrastructure cannot afford to let it idle, which is what happens when applications are moved to a public cloud surreptitiously. Enterprise IT departments are now competing with public cloud providers as the place to go for database capacity, and they are taking a hard look at their operations in order to remain relevant. With the adoption of cloud computing and machine virtualization, the traditional timeconsuming process of provisioning and sizing physical servers no longer makes sense. Many enterprises are already investing in private clouds in their data center to provide selfservice compute and storage, and they re eager for similar capabilities in the database tier. Since database workloads are some of the largest in the enterprise, database support in a private cloud can significantly increase its value. However, database workloads can also be the hardest to accommodate in a cloud environment. Self-service, cloud-based databases have proved harder to achieve than simply providing compute for a number of reasons. Databases, by their nature manage data, making simple strategies used for stateless cloud services inapplicable. Scaling out stateful services complicates recovery and availability. Managing data privacy introduces additional complexity, and database servers don t generally work well in virtualized environments Responding to a Self-Service World Tesora has developed a Database as a Service platform that automates and simplifies traditional provisioning, scaling and management tasks to enable organizations to offer databases on demand in the public or private cloud. Now enterprises can offer the same self-service database experience previously only available from Amazon and a few other cloud services. The platform also provides benefits not available with public cloud offerings. Operators have maximum flexibility in how they tune database configurations for their users since they don t have to comply with the one-size fits all policies of a public cloud provider. The platform also supports a variety of relational and NoSQL databases, allowing developers to choose the preferred database for their application rather than being locked into a particular technology. 2 White Paper Deploying and Provisioning Databases in the Cloud

3 For corporate IT, the internal DBaaS platform provides visibility into operations not possible with an outside service, and the ability to ensure that enterprise polices for statutory compliance, backups, security and the like are implemented properly and consistently. The Tesora platform is based on Trove, the DBaaS component of OpenStack, the world s most popular open source cloud computing platform. A dashboard provides easy to use, ondemand service for users and administrators while the software manages the workload across multiple physical machines. The OpenStack framework is designed to support your current infrastructure while integrating with the widest choices of current and future technologies. Amazon changed the rules for databases, and now they are changing again. The Tesora DBaaS platform provides a new model for how databases are provisioned, managed and consumed, with far-reaching benefits for all stakeholders: For softward developers: Self-Service access to their preferred data store, configured to best meet application requirements For database administrators: Less time on low-level provisioning and scaling tasks, fewer errors and more time available to help achieve business goals For CIOs: Highly efficient utilization of existing resources, reduced risk and the ability to ensure regulatory compliance The following sections examine the architecture of the Tesora database as a service platform, showing how OpenStack, Trove and Tesora enhancements build on each other to enable enterprise class DBaaS. OpenStack: The Open Source Cloud Platform OpenStack is an open source platform for private and public clouds that provides access to large pools of compute, storage and networking resources throughout a corporate IT infrastructure. It is the fastest-growing open source initiative in history, and is rapidly becoming the foundation for enterprises and hosting providers for both public and private clouds. OpenStack originated in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace Hosting and NASA. It is now managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a not-for-profit organization with more than 18,000 individual members and more than 450 supporting companies including IBM, AT&T, Dell, HP, Red Hat, Oracle, Intel and Tesora. The list of vendors and technologies continues to grow. OpenStack has a modular architecture that combines a number of core components and shared services, including: Nova (compute) Cinder (block storage) Trove (database as a service) Neutron (networking) Swift (object storage) Glance (image store) Keystone (identity management) Horizon (monitoring) Heat (orchestration and provisioning) 3 White Paper Deploying and Provisioning Databases in the Cloud

4 Each of these components (including Trove, the DBaaS component) is the focus of an active, vibrant community that is constantly releasing new functionality and enhancements. Tesora chose OpenStack as the foundation for its DBaaS platform for three main reasons: Open: As an open platform for cloud computing, OpenStack provides an alternative to proprietary technology, avoiding lock-in while providing access to a broad ecosystem of solutions from a global developer community. The OpenStack platform also supports existing third-party technologies so you don t have to rip and replace your existing infrastructure and can continue to use your preferred tools. Agile: OpenStack s self-service dashboard and rapid resource provisioning support internal engineering teams, agile business processes and faster product delivery. The ability to leverage OpenStack core components and shared services enables the Tesora Database as a Service platform to incorporate new technologies as they emerge. No Licensing Costs: Because of expensive and complex licensing schemes, some cloud software forces you to make architectural decisions just to contain licensing costs. With OpenStack, the software is freely available under the Apache 2 license. This means you have the freedom to use OpenStack according to your unique requirements. Trove: DBaaS for OpenStack, with Multi-database Support Trove is an open source project that delivers Database as a Service (DBaaS) functionality as part of the OpenStack cloud platform. Trove provides a layer of abstraction for provisioning, scaling and managing databases across commodity servers in the data center. Formerly known as Red Dwarf, Trove is now an official OpenStack project and an integral part of the OpenStack roadmap. Trove is fundamentally different from the various flavors of Amazon RDS, Dynamo DB, Redshift, MongoHQ and other DBaaS offerings in that it provides a framework within which many different database technologies can operate, and where administration is simplified and streamlined. Instead of managing an individual instance of a particular DBMS, you can manage many instances of a variety of different DBMS technologies, all utilizing common infrastructure. 4 White Paper Deploying and Provisioning Databases in the Cloud

5 Trove originated at Rackspace and is now backed by a number of high-profile technology companies. The software was incubated in the Havana release of OpenStack and officially released in OpenStack Icehouse in April Trove is currently in production on a very large scale at Rackspace and HP in their public cloud offerings. Both Rackspace Cloud Databases and HP Cloud Relational Database are based on Trove. ebay and several other major enterprises have also started using Trove in their business operations. Trove Contributors Like other OpenStack projects, the Trove project is a joint development effort by a number of vendors. The major contributors to Trove in the Kilo timeframe are Tesora and HP, followed by ebay, Mirantis and Rackspace. As the only technology vendor specializing in OpenStack Trove, Tesora has the largest dedicated development team working on the Trove project and is the primary provider of OpenStack-related database expertise. According to Stackalytics ( a site dedicated to providing transparent and meaningful statistics regarding contributions to OpenStack, Tesora is the largest contributor to Trove in the Kilo timeframe. OpenStack Trove Commits to the Kilo Release: January 2015 Advantages of the Trove Architecture Differentiates between commmon management and native management A common management and provisioning REST API provides access to DBaaS functionality in a database-agnostic manager. Using this interface you can perform a variety of functions in a unified, simplified way: Spin up instances Create replicas Resize instances Add users and databases Manage database backups Change the instance configuration Applications interact with individual database management systems using native data access APIs that execute the functions in the manner specific to that database. By separating provisioning and management from the intricacies of accessing data within individual databases, Trove makes life easy for both operators and developers. Trove provides selfservice capabilities for developers to provision databases that they can query and update in the manner that they are used to. At the same, operators can manages all of these database technologies in a consistent way without requiring that they be experts in a particular database. Provisioning and Management Mechanism One of the most powerful Trove features is the way that database instances are launched and managed: Prepackaged guest images of virtual machine configurations are stored in an OpenStack repository called Glance. When you boot a guest image, it unpacks itself and produces a full-service, ready-to-use database instance, eliminating the need to provision and configure the database from scratch. 5 White Paper Deploying and Provisioning Databases in the Cloud

6 The guest image includes a guest agent that manages the database instance on behalf of Trove. The guest agent is a small software module that serves as a proxy for Trove to start, stop and manage the various processes that constitute the data store. The result is an architecturally simple construct for provisioning and managing multiple database technologies. It s also very different from Amazon and other closed DBaaS architectures, where adding a non-standard database is either complex or impossible. With Trove, the guest image and guest agent do the work for you. Shared Service Architecture Trove leverages core components and shared services of OpenStack so that enterprises can provision Database as a Service in their environment. As shown in the diagram, Trove uses Nova, the compute controller for OpenStack, to create compute instances virtual machines running across commodity servers. Typically, file system space on which databases are to be stored is allocated at this time using Cinder, OpenStack s block storage service. Glance is the image repository that stores the snapshots used to instantiate the compute instances. When the guest agent performs backups, they are stored in Swift object storage and if necessary restored from Swift. Keystone handles identity management to authenticate users, their roles and their access permissions while network management is provided by Neutron. This shared service architecture means that Trove can leverage OpenStack shared services to take advantage of the latest services and technology. For example, the enterprise may decide to optimize its network, standardize on some new high-performance storage or adopt a different virtualization engine such as VMWare. Trove can use any common infrastructure that OpenStack provides. 6 White Paper Deploying and Provisioning Databases in the Cloud

7 The Tesora DBaaS Platform for Enterprise-Class Database as a Service The Tesora DBaaS platform builds on the OpenStack Trove architecture providing additional capabilities to maximize ease of use, functionality and reliability. The result is an enterpriseclass Database as a Service platform for private and public clouds. Tesora also provides enhancements and expertise to help you get productive quickly with the database service you need. For example, Tesora provides fully-tested, ready-to-use guest images for all databases that Trove supports, which can be downloaded from the Tesora web site. Tesora also provides specialized expertise to adapt existing images or build new ones, as well as assistance in automating repetitive tasks. This expertise, along with automated configuration tools make it easy to deploy Trove quickly into different cloud environments and OpenStack distributions. The result is a new model for how enterprises interact with their databases. Developers can create and deploy their applications on whatever database is best suited for the task at hand, while the service automates the complexities of operating and scaling the underlying infrastructure. For IT staff, the database becomes just another service rather than a timeconsuming central focus. Benefits of the Tesora DBaaS platform include: Multi-database support and certification: The Tesora platform currently supports MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, CouchBase, Percona Server, MariaDB and Cassandra. Support for additional databases is under development. Extensive compatibility testing of databases and Openstack distributions: You can be confident that you will go into production smoothly. Rapid provisioning: Tesora provides pre-built, fully-tested guest images for a variety of databases and configurations that can be downloaded for free at the Tesora web site, dramatically reducing the time to get DBaaS up and running. Single management interface for many database technologies: Common administrative tasks including provisioning, deployment, configuration, tuning and monitoring are achieved in a simple, unified way. Learn one common, easy-to-use management interface, rather than having to be an expert in different databases. Automated backup and recovery: Minimizes data loss and protects against hardware failure with redundant backups. Expert Trove and database services: Tesora s enterprise-class DBaaS solution is complemented by enterprise-class professional services to support your development and production needs. Go into production with confidence because you are working with an experienced team from Tesora. For more information about Tesora, please contact us at info@tesora.com. 125 CambridgePark Drive, Suite 400, Cambridge, MA Tesora Corporation. This document is provided for informational purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure correctness, this document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. The Tesora logo is a trademark of Tesora Corporation. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 7 White Paper Deploying and Provisioning Databases in the Cloud