In a previous post, my colleague Dimitri Vanoverbeke discussed at a high level the concepts of database as a service (DBaaS), OpenStack and OpenStack’s implementation of a DBaaS, Trove. Today I’d like to delve a bit further into Trove and discuss where it fits in, and who benefits.
Just to recap, Trove is OpenStack’s implementation of a database as a service for its cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And as the mission statement declares, the Trove project seeks to provide a scalable and reliable cloud database service providing functionality for both relational and non-relational database engines. With the current release of Icehouse, the technology has begun to show maturity providing both stability and a rich feature set.
In my opinion, there are two primary markets that will benefit from Trove: the first being service providers such as RackSpace who provide cloud-based services similar to Amazon’s AWS. These are companies that wish to expand beyond the basic cloud services of storage and networking and provide their customer base with a richer cloud experience by providing higher level services such as DBaaS functionality. The other players are those companies that wish to “cloudify” their own internal systems. The reasons for this decision are varied, ranging from the desire to maintain complete control over all the architecture and the cloud components to legal constraints limiting the use of public cloud infrastructures.
With Trove, much of the management of your database system is taken care of by automating a significant portion of the configuration and initial setup steps necessitated when launching a new server. This includes deployment, configuration, patching, backups, restores, and monitoring that can be administered from either a CLI interface, RESTful API’s or OpenStack’s Horizon dashboard. At this point, what Trove doesn’t provide is failover, replication and clustering. This functionality is slated to be implemented in the Kilo release of OpenStack due out in April/2015.
The process flow is relatively simple. The OpenStack Administrator first configures the basic infrastructure by installing the database service. He or she would then create an image for each type of database they wish to support such as MySQL or MongoDB. They would then import the images and offer them to their tenants. From the end users perspective only a few commandes are necessary to get up and running. First issuing the <trove create> command to create a database service instance, followed by <trove list> command to get the ID of the instance and finally trove show command to get the IP address of it.
For example to create a database, you first start off by creating a database instance. This is an isolated database environment with compute and storage resources in a single tenant environment on a shared physical host machine. You can run a database instance with a variety of database engines such as MySQL or MongoDB.
From the Trove client I can issue the following command to create a database instance called PS_troveinstance, with a volume size of 2 GB, a user called PS_user, a password PS_password and the MySQL datastore (or database engine):
$ trove create –size 2 –users PS_user:PS_password –datastore MySQL PS_troveinstance
Next I issue the following command to get the ID of the database instance:
$ trove list PS_troveinstance
And finally, to create a database called PS_trovedb, I execute:
$ trove database-create PS_troveinstance PS_trovedb
Alternatively, I could have just combined the above commands as:
$ trove create –size 2 —-database PS_trovedb users PS_user:PS_password –datastore MySQL PS_troveinstance
And thus we now have a MySQL database server containing a database called PS_trovedb.
In our next post on OpenStack/Trove, we’ll dig even further and discuss the software and hardware requirements, and how to actually set up Trove.
On a related note, Percona has several experts attending this week’s OpenStack Operations Summit in San Antonio, Texas. One of them is Matt Griffin, director of product management, who pointed out in a recent post that many OpenStack operators use Percona open source software including the MySQL drop-in compatible Percona Server and Galera-based Percona XtraDB Cluster as well as tools such as Percona XtraBackup and Percona Toolkit. “We see a need in the community to understand how to improve MySQL performance in OpenStack. As a result, Percona, submitted 16 presentations for November’s Paris OpenStack Summit,” Matt said. So stay tuned for related news from him, too, on that front.
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