Sunday, February 27, 2011

A2A 'Cloud Comparison' - Database as a Service

This is part of my series of articles on A2A Cloud Comparison. In my previous articles I was explaining my views of A2A Comparison with Compute and Storage. In this article I will provide my views on Database as a Service with Amazon and Azure.

Introduction
We all know how data is crucial to an application take an example whether it is a banking application or an online music store application, data is very important to the whole system. Say you have recently registered and created a user on a specific site and if the user identity is not found next time when you login to the site think how much hesitation will get and you will think twice before continuing to use the site. Think of what will happen if you lose some data in a critical financial application. Losing the data will incur heavy loss to the system or make the application really obsolete. The reason why I am talking about data criticality is because in this blog I am going to talk about the database as a service offering from the cloud computing providers.
When we talk about data most of the applications store their data in a database and managing the database will be a crucial task for the system. Database administration helps to manage the database and assures to keep the database updated and highly available. I want to list some to tasks performed as part of database administration
1. Patching the database software up to date
2. Taking backups of the database
3. Maintaining the backup for the specified retention period
4. Point in time recovery

Database as Service
What if all the database administration tasks have been taken care and have ability to scale the capacity with high availability and reliability? Database as a Service is the answer for that.

Amazon and Azure Offerings
Both Amazon and Azure provides offerings in the database as a service space and are differentiated in some ways. Amazon provides its offering as RDS (Relational Database as a Service) while Microsoft Azure provides its offering as SQL Azure.
Amazon operates RDS in Infrastructure as a Service space while Microsoft SQL Azure operates at Platform as a Service space, I will be explaining it in detail below. Following the general cloud pricing model this service will also be charged in a Pay as you use model.

RDS:
Amazon offering for Database as a service called RDS (Relational Database as a Service) provides database service for MYSQL database. Recently Amazon has made an announcement that will extend RDS for Oracle database, that means you will be able to create an Oracle database with all the setup ready in matter of minutes and you can able to create and delete the instances with hourly chargeback model and with all database administration tasks taken care..Sounds interesting?
Every RDS instance in Amazon will get a dedicated virtual server instance, database storages with all the data backup and retention policies configured, this is why I called RDS operating in Infrastructure as a Service space and because of its underlying virtualization model the instance can be migrated to a bigger server configuration if needed. Database servers can also be configured for Read replication or Multi Availability Zone deployment for high availability and Disaster Recovery.
Recently I have to validate the performance of Oracle database in a specific use case for a POC, for scenarios like this it will be difficult in non cloud model because Oracle software licenses will be charged for duration of a year at least and the licenses are Processor based or Socket based. It will be difficult to compromise with express edition or a single socket license as we have to validate performance scenario and now with cloud model it is easy to execute, create and use it for the period needed and release it when POC is done , as simple as that.

SQL Azure:
Microsoft offering for Database as a Service called SQL Azure provides service for SQL Server database. With SQL Azure we will be able to create databases for 1GB, 5GB up to a maximum of 50GB. We can create a smaller DB during creation and can later alter to a maximum of 50GB with all the database management tasks taken care operating in a pay as you use model.
Microsoft operates SQL Azure in a way bit different from Amazon RDS. Unlike RDS SQL Azure does not spare a dedicated virtual server for databases instead multiple SQL Azure databases will be hosted in a bigger SQL Server instance and will be operating more like a shared multi tenant environment with all the tenant specific security measures taken care, this architecture will be abstracted from the end user as the end user will be able to operate the database in a usual way and the user is assured with high availability and scalability.
One thing that has to take care in SQL Azure is that it can scale to a maximum of 50GB as of now and beyond that we have to plan for horizontal scaling of database in our application architecture.

References:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/inside-sql-azure.aspx
http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

2 comments:

  1. Great post.

    I am wondering how could Amazon take MYSQL and use it for commercial purposes. Is that allowed? Same is my question with licenses for Oracle.

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  2. Hi Vivek,
    Amazon has taken the open source version of MySQL and added / automated some services on top of it and providing it as a service.
    With respect to Oracle , Amazon is providing this service in partnership with Oracle with the software license earnings payed to Oracle.

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