Achieving Cost and Resource efficiency within OpenStack through Trove Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS)

V1.0

Dean Delamont8th January 2016

Context

One of biggest challenges to organizations is how to leverage their Openstack infrastructure in a cost effective way to deploy their solutions. Also where their solutions are built upon traditional (non-cloud) proprietary databases this presents further challenges.

In addition where there is great uncertainty over the underlying database technology which is ever evolving this represents a major cost to many organizations having to choose to invest in multiple infrastructures and technologies without certainty as to the longevity of their investment.

In this presentation we explore how Trove can provide a uniformed solution for all database types – MySQL, Oracle, Mongo, Cassandra etc. and whether as a business by integrating our solutions with the OpenStack Trove DBaaS module we can benefit from:

Cost and resource savings; Reduced complexity

Introduction to DBaaS Today databases are used extensively within our solutions and are a

core part of our solutions holding business critical subscriber data and service related data for our customers.

Traditionally these databases were installed on a customer site and hosted on dedicated hardware as bare metal (non cloud). These databases remained relatively static and never scaled.

Conversely within other state of the art cloud platforms like Amazon’s AWS Cloud or other private clouds Infrastructure as a Service’s (IaaS) platforms based similar to us on OpenStack such as RackSpace among others, these solutions provide databases inside Virtual Machines (VMs) with the use of advanced Cloud technologies such as Database As A Service (DBaaS) that allow users to simply and easily spin up new database instances on demand through self service portals.

These state-of-the-art platforms provide speed, scale and agility through the utlisation of DBaaS technologies whilst also maintaining a high service availability of 99.95% in order to meet their Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

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Introduction to DBaaS

This provides organizations and developers the ability to focus on building their products and improving their applications without worrying about managing the database infrastructure. It also gives the ability to rapidly rollout multiple database instances and different database technologies i.e. Oracle, Mongo, Cassandra, that can efficiently share the same OpenStack and Database infrastructure giving greater flexibility in the choice for database technologies.  In addition it offer a number of advantages to businesses including;  Savings on cost efficiencies though utilizing the same infrastructure for multiple

Database types reducing their TCO. A standardized process and infrastructure within OpenStack to rapidly deploy new

databases, new functionality accelerating time to market within a consistent framework Self-service dashboard and APIs enabling end users to rapidly provision as well as

monitor and manage databases throughout the life cycle of the database without needing to understand the complexity of individual database infrastructures and technologies.

Ease of Elasticity/Scalability – the ability to scale you databases with ease as your needs grow. Where customers can scale their databases in two manners:

• Based on User Demand (Reed Scaling) – where you need to increase capacity to support a higher volume of user requests for your service.

• Based on the volume of data (Data Scaling) - where for example you need to increase the size of your database to support the increased size in the volume of data needed to be persisted in your database volumes for your service.

Introduction to Trove

Trove is an OpenStack Database As a Service (DBaaS) which provides a simple, reliable and scalable provising, monitoring and management system for single and multiple Database instances within a private cloud. Supports both MySQL and non SQL Databases.

Provides a self-service, managed database service through an extended OpenStack HORIZON dashboard UI that allows you to perform otherwise complex administration tasks in a simple way through single actions in a UI.

Provides an enterprise level system for fully managing multiple Databases with the cloud including monitoring, backup etc.

http://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Trove

Introduction to Trove

Multi-Database Architecture – supports traditional MySQL and non SQL databases agnostic. Future proof.

Introduction to Trove Part of the OpenStack Optional Services:

Core Services

Optional Enhanced Services

SWIFTObject Storage

GLANCEImage Service

NEUTRONNetworking

CINDERBlock Storage

KEYSTONEIDENTITY

NOVACOMPUTE LAYER

HORIZONDashboard UI

CEILOMETERTELEMETRY

SAHARAData

Processing

TROVE(DBaaS)

HEATOrchestrationIRONIC

Bare MetalMAGNUN

Container Service

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Trove OpenStack Architecture Overview

Integral to OpenStack and designed for On-Prem Private Cloud implementations

Adoption of Trove

Originally released as a part of the Icehouse release, Trove aims to automate much of this process by using existing OpenStack components to manage tasks like infrastructure deployment, storage allocation, monitoring, and replication.

Both Oracle 11g and 12c have been certified on Trove by Tesora. Has been part of the Core OpenStack Modules for many years now and has been adopted by:

• HP• Ebay• PayPal• Mirantis (Major contributor to Trove)• Ubuntu • Rackspace• Percona • A much longer list than above, growing by the day.

Key Features

Provides suitable enterprise level tools for DB Creation, deletion etc. where in an instant you can spin up a new instance from a simple Dashboard

Enhanced and easy to administer Horizon Dashboard UI (As of Kilo Release) Automates complex administrative like patching (Security), configuration, user

permissions, backups, upgrades, restores, and monitoring again all configurable through simple dashboard.

Support for Failover Self-service Database Provisioning - Provides an easy self-service way to quickly

select, provision, and operate a data management infrastructure in a secure, scalable, and reliable manner.

Full Database Life Cycle Management Multi-database support – can run single or multiple databases Supports both Relational and no relation databases Offers us a flexible solution that allows us to move to other Databases

implementation more quickly and in a less costly manor – instead of tying ourselves to one database “Oracle”

Replication framework – single master, multiple slaves, MySQL replication (from Juno Release) where you can specify a master DB and slave for the purpose of auto scaling.

Key Features

Allows you to manages multiple database instances from again a simple Dashboard easy to administrate

Supports mixed DB environment – Oracle + Cassandra + Mongo + many others Provides enhanced Logging and Monitoring specific to Databases through simple

easy to manage dashboard – not just CPU/Memory usage but provides an API to monitor and report the state of datastores.

SLA Level - Automated/intelligent recovery mechanisms – Promotes a slave to master if master fails, provisions new slave if detects a slave failed, self repair for clustered databases on failed nodes, gathers metrics, sends automated alerts to engineers and much more. Integrated with LogStash, Elastic Search, Kibana.

Provides a coherent infrastructure to manage the diversity of databases we will have in the future – Cassandra, Mongo (a long list). It solves not just our short term need to solve the issue of Oracle support on OpenStack but also addresses our future needs, where we shall be able to migrate more quickly our applications to other Databases reducing our costs longer term.

Reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)

NOTE: Its worth noting that as well as being part of the OpenStack official implementation, Trove has a major community of of developers working on Trove and many organisations like Mirantis and Tesora working on Trove

Don’t take my word for it see what Oracle and others have to say about trove: http://www.slideshare.net/mattalord/mysql-dbaas-with-openstack-trove

5 Key Reasons – Why as a business we need Trove

Reduces development costs – Provides a uniformed common infrastructure in which to write our Apps to single common API framework, which can be reused across multiple DB technologies. Here we write our code once not several times each time trying to understand intricately in detail how the new Database technology works, such as how to do backup, grow the cluster, scale etc. all currently things today we are doing at our cost and time!

Reduced OPEX Costs – Through a simplified dashboard this greatly reduces the operational complexity allowing end users at ease to perform complicated related administration and operational functions through simple UI functions without the need to call on the DBA. Empowers the end user to self create, operate and manage their chosen database technology instances in the cloud easily and simply where effort to create the database infrastructure is done once by the DBA and re-used by all.

Greater product Velocity – It takes minutes to create a new Database instance using Trove, something that ordinarily would take us considerable man effort and time if we did ourselves.

Greater ability to innovate – The speed at which one can select and deploy a new chosen database technology using Trove is significantly faster by a phenomenal magnitude of order compared to doing it by ourselves manually and at our own cost. Through DBaaS and Trove we can leverage new Database technologies faster than any other approach. As a business this allows us greater flexibility to innovate.

Reduced TCO – If your still not convinced, then consider the cost savings that shall be gained by having one common database infrastructure for all of solutions and our databases. This is where Trove excels as an approach as not only does it reduce development costs, OPEX, it also reduces CAPEX where as a result of all of this we gain cost efficiencies at a wider scale that in turn drives down our TCO.

Alternative Paths

Alternatives - Go in your own direction opposite to OpenStack and develop a bespoke custom solution which may be costly and expensive to develop and maintain. Plus it may not cover half the functionality of Trove that is already available. In addition you may have issues with support and any work undertaken could be throw away where your organisation may need to migrate its solution to an alternative database technology.

Trove is rapidly becoming the solution for provisioning and managing all of the relational and non-relational database resources within many enterprises. It is in fact the only considered enterprise level solution for a DBaaS within a Private Cloud. Anything else is a choice to invest in custom potentially wasted development effort building database infrastructures and orchestration which goes in the opposite direction to the main direction for OpenStack.

Not convinced?

1. Databases don’t stay static anymore, the rate of changes in the adoption mainstream of new database technologies has evolved more in the last 5 years than ever before, where businesses cant rely on simply buying all their database needs from single provider such as Oracle. Todays successful businesses need to innovate, scale, deploy more reliably their solutions in the cloud and need the means provision create new database types for testing of new features, upgrading and patching of databases across multiple test environments and their CI-CD pipeline. Can you be sure that the database technology your using today will be the same in the next 5 years? If not I recommend considering the value of a one time investment of using DBaaS which supports multiple database types in which your employees can then leverage the Trove APIs to create their Databases with ease and within minutes (Not weeks or months as it may take doing it yourself).

2. DBaaS doesn’t just solve the problem of the set up but provides the end user a full database life cycle solution covering complex database tasks like Replication, HA, User Management, Restore, Backup and Cluster Management etc. needed by any business that needs to maintain service availability in the cloud of 99.95%. All of this in a custom approach takes time and money away from businesses who’s primary business is in selling its products and software, not building custom database infrastructures at the expense of slowing their products time to market.

3. Support for multiple database types – Presently many businesses solutions are working with multiple database technologies adding complexity and costs to the business to maintain custom infrastructures for each database type such as MongoDB, Couchbase, Cassandra, Oracle 11g, Oracle 12c, Oracle RAC, Postgre. This is an unsustainable model where the custom effort to support this is a potential significant drain on the critical resources to a business.

4. Consider also that with new open source mySQL and noSQL databases these are changing at an unprecedented rate of development where new versions are coming out every few days or weeks (not even months) and certainly not years as we used to see with Oracle. Can your business afford to fund spending significant resource on supporting all of this? If no, why not consider making a one time investment in DBaaS where you have a common API framework for all database types that once you have invested in you can re-use time and time again not worrying about the cost of how your business will support the building of custom database infrastructures.

To find out more on Trove visit: https://www.tesora.com and https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Trove

Consider:

“Since 2000, 52% of the companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired, ceased to exist, or dropped off the list • Digitalization of business is a key factor in this accelerated pace of change. Information flows faster. Cloud is the foundation for digital transformation – Ubiquity and ease of adoption – Unlimited and dynamic capacity – Helps you innovate faster” Ray Wang, Constellation Research Cloud: ”Single Most Disruptive Technology” Source: Forbes

Dean Delamont8th January 2016

Closing Thought

Supplementary Material

Supplementary Material

Supplementary Material