In this blog, we’ll discuss the Data in the Cloud track at Percona Live with Red Hat’s Brent Compton and Ross Turk.
Welcome to another interview with the Percona Live Data Performance Conference speakers and presenters. This series of blog posts will highlight some of the talks and presentations available at Percona Live Data Performance Conference April 18-21 in Santa Clara. Read through to the end for a discounts for Percona Live registration.
(A webinar sneak preview of their “MySQL on Ceph” cloud storage talk is happening on Wednesday, April 6th at 2 pm EDT. You can register for it here – all attendees will receive a special $200 discount code for Percona Live registration after the webinar! See the end of this blog post for more details!)
First, we need to establish some context. Data storage has traditionally, and for most of its existence, pretty much followed a consistent model: stable and fairly static big box devices that were purpose-built to house data. Needing more storage space meant obtaining more (or bigger) boxes. Classic scale-up storage. Need more, go to the data storage vendor and order a bigger box.
The problem is that data is exploding, and has been exponentially for the last decade. Some estimates put the amount of data being generated worldwide increasing at a rate of 40%-60% per year. That kind of increase, and at that speed, doesn’t leave a lot of ramp up time to make long term big box hardware investments. Things are changing too fast.
The immediate trend – evident by declining revenues of class storage boxes – is placing data in a cloud of scale-out storage. What is the cloud? Since that question has whole books devoted to it, let’s try to simplify it a bit.
Cloud computing benefits include scalability, instantaneous configuration, virtualized consumables and the ability to quickly expand base specifications. Moving workloads to the cloud brings with it numerous business benefits, including agility, focus and cost:
- Agility. The cloud enables businesses to react to changing needs. As the workload grows or spikes, just add compute cycles, storage, and bandwidth with the click of a mouse.
- Focus. Deploying workloads to the cloud enables companies to focus more resources on business-critical activities, rather than system administration.
- Cost. Businesses can pay as they go for the services level they need. Planning and sinking money into long-term plans that may or may not pan out is not as big a problem.
When it comes to moving workloads into the cloud, the low throughput applications were the obvious first choice: email, non-critical business functions, team collaboration assistance. These generally are neither mission critical, nor require high levels of security. As applications driven services became more and more prevalent (think Netflix, Facebook, Instagram), more throughput intensive services were moved to the cloud – mainly for flexibility during service spikes and to accommodate increased users. But tried and true high-performance workloads like databases and other corporate kingdoms that have perceived higher security requirements have traditionally remained stuck in the old infrastructures that have served well – until now.
So what is this all leading to? Well, according to Brent and Ross, ALL data will eventually be going to the cloud, and the old models of storage infrastructure are falling by the wayside. Between the lack of elasticity and scalability of purpose-built hardware, and the oncoming storage crisis, database storage is headed for cloud services solutions.
I had some time to talk with Brent and Ross about data in the cloud, and what we can expect regarding a new data performance cloud model.
Percona: There is always a lot of talk about public versus private paradigms when it comes to cloud discussions. To you, this is fairly inconsequential. How do see “the cloud?” How would you define it terms of infrastructure for workloads?
RHT: Red Hat has long provided software for hybrid clouds, with the understanding that most companies will use a mix of public cloud and private cloud infrastructure for their workloads. This means that Red Hat software is supported both on popular public cloud platforms (such as AWS, Azure, and GCE) as well as on-premise platforms (such as OpenStack private clouds). Our work with Percona in providing a reference architecture for MySQL running on Ceph is all about giving app developers a comparable, deterministic experience when running their MySQL-based apps on a Ceph private storage cloud v. running them in the public cloud.
Percona: So, your contention is that ALL data is headed to the cloud. What are the factors that are going ramp up this trend? What level of information storage will cement this as inevitable?
RHT: We’d probably restate this to “most data is headed to A cloud.” Two distinctions being made in this statement. The first is “most” versus “all” data. For years to come, there will be late adopters with on-premise data NOT being served through a private cloud infrastructure. The second distinction is “a” cloud versus “the” cloud. “A” cloud means either a public cloud or a private cloud (or some hybrid of the two). Private clouds are being constructed by the world’s most advanced companies within their own data centers to provide a similar type of elastic infrastructure with dynamic provisioning and lower CAPEX/OPEX costs (as is found in public clouds).
Percona: What are the concerns you see with moving all workloads to the cloud, and how would you address those concerns?
RHT: The distinctions laid out in the previous answer address this. For myriad reasons, some data and workloads will reside on-premise within private clouds for a very long time. In fact, as the technology matures for building private clouds (as we’re seeing with OpenStack and Ceph), and can offer many of the same benefits as public clouds, we see the market reaching an equilibrium of sorts. In this equilibrium many of the agility, flexibility, and cost benefits once available only through public cloud services will be matched by private cloud installations. This will re-base the public versus private cloud discussion to fewer, simpler trade-offs – such as which data must reside on-premises to meet an enterprise’s data governance and control requirements.
Percona: So you mentioned the “Data Performance Cloud”? How would you describe that that is, and how it affects enterprises?
RHT: For many enterprises, data performance workloads have been the last category of workloads to move a cloud, whether public or private. Public cloud services, such as AWS Relational Database Service with Provisioned-IOPS storage, have illustrated improved data performance for many workloads once relegated to the cloud sidelines. Now, with guidelines in the reference architecture being produced by Percona and the Red Hat Ceph team, customers can achieve comparable data performance on their private Ceph storage clouds as they do with high-performance public cloud services.
Percona: What can people expect to get out of the Data in the Cloud track at Percona Live this year?
RHT: Architecture guidelines for building and optimizing MySQL databases on a Ceph private storage cloud. These architectures will include public cloud benefits along with private cloud control and governance.
Want to find out more about MySQL, Ceph, and Data in the Cloud? Register for Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016, and see Red Hat’s sponsored Data in the Cloud Keynote Panel: Cloudy with a chance of running out of disk space? Or Sunny times ahead? Use the code “FeaturedTalk” and receive $100 off the current registration price!
The Percona Live Data Performance Conference is the premier open source event for the data performance ecosystem. It is the place to be for the open source community as well as businesses that thrive in the MySQL, NoSQL, cloud, big data and Internet of Things (IoT) marketplaces. Attendees include DBAs, sysadmins, developers, architects, CTOs, CEOs, and vendors from around the world.
The Percona Live Data Performance Conference will be April 18-21 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara & The Santa Clara Convention Center.
MySQL and Ceph: Database-as-a-Service sneak preview
Businesses are familiar with running a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) in the public cloud. They enjoy the benefits of on-demand infrastructure for spinning-up lots of MySQL instances with predictable performance, without the headaches of managing them on specific, bare-metal highly available clusters.
This webinar lays the foundation for building a DBaaS on your own private cloud, enabled by Red Hat® Ceph Storage. Join senior architects from Red Hat and Percona for reference architecture tips and head-to-head performance results of MySQL on Ceph versus MySQL on AWS.
This is a sneak preview of the labs and talks to be given in April 2016 at the Percona Live Data
Performance Conference. Attendees received a discount code for $200 off Percona Live registration!
Speakers:
- Brent Compton, director, Storage Solution Architectures, Red Hat
- Kyle Bader, senior solutions architect, Red Hat
- Yves Trudeau, principal consultant, Percona
Join the live event:
Wednesday, April 6, 2016 | 2 p.m. ET | 11 a.m. PT