Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Enterprises have spent years modernizing applications for the cloud, yet databases often remain a holdout. Many teams turn to managed database services for convenience, only to find that hidden markups, unpredictable scaling fees, and vendor lock-in erode the financial and operational benefits cloud adoption was meant to deliver. Pressure to control spend, meet evolving compliance […]

Originally published on The New Stack. Building a flexible cloud strategy means making decisions that align with operational efficiency, cost management, and scalability. Public cloud platforms offer immense convenience but come with certain downsides. High long-term costs, vendor lock-in, and lack of flexibility are concerns for many organizations. As businesses grow, the allure of quick-starting […]

The popularity of Database as a Service (DBaaS) solutions is on the rise. It’s not hard to see why. DBaaS enables users to offload administrative tasks and maintenance, allowing them to reap the benefits of a database without the traditional overhead.

However, public DBaaS solutions are not suitable for all organizations. Some organizations have strict data sovereignty requirements that preclude them from using public cloud services. Others may find initial adoption relatively affordable, but as their workload grows, so do the costs, often exuberantly so. 

At Percona, we’ve been hard at work on a new open source DBaaS product. Our DBaaS solution, named Percona Everest, enables users to effortlessly deploy and manage databases regardless of their preferred deployment environment — on-prem, cloud, and hybrid. If you’re a regular visitor to the Percona Blog, you might have even seen last week’s Alpha release announcement.  

As we continue to iterate on Percona Everest, we’d love to hear about your experiences with DBaaS solutions, both public and private. We’re particularly interested in opinions from: 

• Developers who use DBaaS solutions to provision self-service databases 
• Database administrators and others who help manage databases 
• IT team leads or managers experienced with public or private DBaaS 

Your thoughts will help us shape the future of Percona Everest. Our survey will only take two minutes of your time, and in return, we will send you some Percona swag as a thank-you.

 

Share your opinion

Today’s businesses face two major challenges when it comes to managing databases: vendor lock-in of public cloud providers and the inherent complexity of running and managing databases. With limited freedom of choice and the burden of navigating complex infrastructures, companies often find themselves bound to single cloud providers, restricting their ability to take advantage of the best available tools and services. Furthermore, managing a myriad of databases across multiple environments poses a daunting task, requiring significant effort and resources.

Introducing Percona Everest

Percona, a leading provider of open source database software and services, is thrilled to unveil Percona Everest, an innovative, open source, private Database as a Service (DBaaS) solution.

Percona Everest revolutionizes the landscape of database management by embracing the power of open source stack. By enabling users to run their databases anywhere – on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments – through the seamless integration of Percona’s Kubernetes Operators, Percona Everest breaks free from the confines of public cloud providers. With an intuitive user interface, a flexible API, and a powerful command-line interface (CLI), Percona Everest empowers users to effortlessly deploy and manage databases regardless of their preferred deployment environment.

Percona Everest is currently in the alpha stage, with extensive testing and development underway to ensure a stable and robust solution.

Where to begin

Prerequisites

Before getting started with Percona Everest, do the following:

1. Install Docker Engine (1.13.0 and higher) with the Docker compose plugin
2. Install curl
3. Install jq
4. Set up a publicly accessible Kubernetes cluster
   Percona Everest assists with installing all the necessary operators and required packages but does not currently help with spinning up a publicly accessible Kubernetes cluster. For more information on how to spin up k8s, you can visit our documentation for EKS or GKE
5. Verify that you have access to the Kubernetes cluster that you want to use with Everest. By default, Everest uses the kubeconfig file available under ~/.kube/config. To verify access to the Kubernetes cluster, run the following command:
   

   kubectl get nodes

Quick install

Once you have installed the packages and have the Kubernetes cluster up and running, run the following command to install Percona Everest:

curl -sfL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/percona/percona-everest-cli/v0.3.0/install.sh" | bash

Percona Everest UI opens in your browser. Now, you can deploy your first database cluster.

More

We encourage you to visit the documentation page to understand more about Percona Everest. There, you can find detailed installation instructions, known limitations, API docs, and various how-tos.

Percona Everest is completely open source, and you can find the code in the following repositories:

1. percona-everest-backend – contains all the backend logic
2. percona-everest-frontend – graphical user interface and design 
3. percona-everest-cli – Command Line tool to deploy and manage Everest
4. everest-doc – repository with documentation that appears here

Contributing

Here are a few ways you can get involved:

Share your feedback: Whether you’ve encountered a bug, have an idea for a new feature, or simply want to provide general feedback, your insights are invaluable. Visit our GitHub Issues or Feedback Forum to start the conversation.

Contribute code: If you’re a developer, you can directly impact the development of Percona Everest by contributing your code. Check out our GitHub repository to get started.

Spread the word: Help us grow the Everest community by sharing your experiences, tutorials, or success stories on social media or tech forums.

Participate in discussions: Engage with fellow users and developers in our community forums. Share your experiences, exchange ideas, and help each other overcome challenges.

Remember, every contribution, no matter how big or small, makes a difference. Your input and contributions can help shape the future of Percona Everest and create a platform that helps provide the benefits of DBaaS on-prem or in the public cloud of your choice.

 

Get started with Percona Everest

One of the installation methods we support for our database software is through Helm. We have a collection of Helm charts, in this repository, for the following Percona software:

• Percona Operator for MySQL
• Percona XtraDB Cluster
• Percona Operator for MongoDB
• Percona Server for MongoDB
• Percona Operator for PostgreSQL
• Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL
• Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)

Through this blog post, you will learn how to install Percona Monitoring and Management in a Kubernetes cluster on Amazon EKS using Helm and eksctl.

Requirements

For the installation of PMM with Helm, you will need:

• Kubernetes 1.22+
• Helm 3.2.0+
• PV (Persistent Volume) provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure

If you want to install PMM in a Kubernetes cluster on Amazon EKS, you can use eksctl to create the required cluster. I published this blog post Creating a Kubernetes cluster on Amazon EKS with eksctl, in the Percona Community blog, where I explain how to use this tool.

For an easy way to deploy the Kubernetes cluster, check Percona My Database as a Service (MyDBaaS), a Percona Labs project. I also recommend checking this article Percona Labs Presents: Infrastructure Generator for Percona Database as a Service (DBaaS) on our blog, where the process of creating the cluster is described.

MyDBaaS will help you with cluster creation. It will generate the configuration file needed for eksctl, or it can deploy the cluster to AWS.

To use eksctl you must:

• Install kubectl
• Create a user with minimum IAM policies
• Create an access key ID and secret access key for the user previously created
• Install AWS CLI and configure authentication (

  aws configure

  , from the command line)

• Install eksctl

Create a Kubernetes cluster

To create the cluster, you need to generate the configuration file for eksctl. Go to https://mydbaas.labs.percona.com/ and fill out the details of your cluster.

1. Give your cluster a name. MyDbaas is the default value.
2. Select the number of nodes. The value selected by default is three but you can create a cluster of up to five nodes.
3. Write the instance type.
4. Select the region. The default is us-west-2.

If you don’t know what instance type to use, go to the Instance Type Selector and select:

• Number of CPUs
• Memory size
• Region

As stated on the website, this tool will only return the configuration file needed for eksctl. You can also provide your AWS credentials for the tool to deploy the EKS cluster.

After filling out the details, click on Submit and you will get the configuration file that will look like this:

addons:
- name: aws-ebs-csi-driver
apiVersion: eksctl.io/v1alpha5
kind: ClusterConfig
metadata:
  name: MyDbaas
  region: us-east-1
nodeGroups:
- desiredCapacity: 2
  iam:
    withAddonPolicies:
      ebs: true
      efs: true
      fsx: true
  instanceType: m5.large
  maxSize: 5
  minSize: 1
  name: ng-1
  preBootstrapCommands:
  - echo 'OPTIONS="--default-ulimit nofile=1048576:1048576"' >> /etc/sysconfig/docker
  - systemctl restart docker
  volumeSize: 100
  volumeType: gp2

Then, create the cluster by running the following command:

eksctl create cluster -f cluster.yaml

While running, eksctl will create the cluster and all the necessary resources. It will take a few minutes to complete.

Cluster credentials can be found in

~/.kube/config

. Try

kubectl get nodes

to verify that this file is valid, as suggested by eksctl.

Install PMM with Helm

Once the cluster has been created and configured, you can install PMM using Helm.

1. Add the repository

helm repo add percona https://percona.github.io/percona-helm-charts/

2. Install PMM

helm install pmm --set service.type="LoadBalancer" percona/pmm

Once the PMM server runs, you must get its IP address. Run this command to get this value.

kubectl get services monitoring-service

You will get an output similar to the following.

NAME                 TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP                                                              PORT(S)                      AGE
monitoring-service   LoadBalancer   10.100.17.121   a57d50410ca2f4c9d9b029da8f44f73f-254463297.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com   443:30252/TCP,80:31201/TCP   100s

a57d50410ca2f4c9d9b029da8f44f73f-254463297.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com

 is the external IP and the one you need to access PMM from the browser.

Before accessing the dashboard of PMM, get the password.

export ADMIN_PASS=$(kubectl get secret pmm-secret --namespace default -o jsonpath='{.data.PMM_ADMIN_PASSWORD}' | base64 --decode)
echo $ADMIN_PASS

The value of

$ADMIN_PASS

  is the password you need to log into the dashboard. The default user is admin.

Go to the browser and paste the external IP in the address bar.

Now you have PMM running in the cloud on Amazon EKS.

I recommend you check this article Percona Monitoring and Management in Kubernetes is now in Tech Preview on our blog for more information about PMM in Kubernetes using Helm.

Conclusion

Through this blog post, you learned how to create a Kubernetes cluster with eksctl and deploy PMM using Helm with the help of Percona MyDBaaS. The process would be the same for any of the Percona software in the collection of Helm charts.

Learn more about Percona MyDBaaS!

Let’s look at how you can run Percona databases on Kubernetes, the easy way.

Chances are that if you are using the latest Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) version, you have seen the availability of the new Percona Database as a Service (DBaaS). If not, go and get a glimpse of the fantastic feature with our docs on DBaaS – Percona Monitoring and Management.

Now, if you like it and wanna give it a try! (Yay!), but you don’t wanna deal with Kubernetes, (nay)o worries; we have a tool for you. Introducing the Percona DBaaS Infrastructure Creator, or Percona My Database as a Service (MyDBaaS).

My Database as a Service

First, a clarification: this tool is focused on running your DBaaS on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

At the time of the writing of this article, the PMM DBaaS supported a limited number of cloud vendors, AWS being one of them. This tool creates the infrastructure in an AWS account.

The usage is pretty simple. You have three features:

• An instance selector: In case you don’t know what instance type to use, but you do know how many CPUs and how much memory your DBs requires.
• A Cluster Creator: This is where you decide on some minimal and basic properties of the cluster and deploy it.
• Deploy a Percona Operator: You can choose from our three Operators for Kubernetes to be deployed on the same infrastructure you are creating.

Instance selector

Currently, AWS has 270 different instance types available. Which one to use? The instance selector will help you with that. Just pass the number of vCPUs, amount of memory, and the region you intend to use, and it will show a list of EKS-suitable EC2 instances.

Why ask for the region? Costs! Instances types have different costs depending on the region they are in, and costs are something the tool will show you:

Cluster creator

A very basic interface. You only need to pass the name of the cluster, the amount of desired nodes, the instance type, and on which region you would like to run the cluster.

If you pass your AWS key/secret, the tool will take care of deploying the cluster, and once it is done, it will return the contents of the Kubeconfig file for you to use in the DBaaS of PMM.

A note on how we handle your AWS key/secret

Percona will never store this information. In the particular case of this tool, we do set the following environment variables:

• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
• AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
• AWS_DEFAULT_REGION

After the creation of the cluster, the environment variables are unset.

Now, why is there an option to not pass the AWS credentials? Well, for security, of course. 

Under the hood, the cluster is created using EKSCTL, a “CloudFormation stack creator.” 

If you are proficient enough with ekstcl, you can just copy/paste the created YAML and run the eksctl command on your own server without sharing your credentials ever. Now, for DBaaS, you still have to provide them, but that’s another topic

If you choose to pass the AWS credentials, an EKS cluster will be deployed. The outcome will be the contents of the kubeconfig file

With that in place, one can now go to PMM and register the Kubernetes cluster as described in https://docs.percona.com/percona-monitoring-and-management/dbaas/get-started.html#add-a-kubernetes-cluster to deploy the DBaaS in there.

But there’s more:

Percona Operators

Now, there’s an additional option: deploying a Percona Operator. Currently, PMM DBaaS focuses on the Percona Operator for MySQL based on Percona XtraDB Cluster. With the MyDBaaS tool, you can choose from three operators available.

To have the full deployment, you need to check both AWS credentials and deploy a Percona Operator.

At the end of the installation, you will have the contents of the Kubeconfig file, plus:

• The password of the root user 
• Instructions on how to connect to it

After this, you can use a Percona database running on Kubernetes. Have fun!

About Percona Labs

Percona Labs is a place for the community to have a voice on how we approach solutions, curated by Percona’s CTO, Vadim Tkachenko. Feedback is always welcome:

Community Forum

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) comes with Database as a Service (DBaaS) functionality that allows you to deploy highly-available databases through a simple user interface and API. PMM DBaaS is sort of unique for various reasons:

• It is fully open source and free
• It runs on your premises – your data center or public cloud account
• The databases are deployed on Kubernetes and you have full control over your data

PMM features a robust API but while I have seen demos on the internet demonstrating the UI, I have never seen anything about API. PMM API is great for building tools that can automate workflows and operations at scale. In this blog post, I’m going to impersonate a developer playing with PMMs API to deploy and manage databases. I also created an experimental CLI tool in python to showcase the possible integration.

Preparation

At the end of this step, you should have the following:

• Percona Monitoring and Management up and running
• Kubernetes cluster 
• PMM API token generated

First off, you need a PMM server installed and reachable from your environment. See the various installation ways in our documentation.

For DBaaS to work you would also need a Kubernetes cluster. You can use minikube, or leverage the recently released free Kubernetes capability (in this case it will take you ~2 minutes to set everything up).

To automate various workflows, you will need programmatic access to Percona Monitoring and Management. The recommended way is API tokens. To generate it please follow the steps described here. Please keep in mind that for now, you need admin-level privileges to use DBaaS.

Using API

I will use our API documentation for all the experiments here. DBaaS has a dedicated section. In each step, I will provide an example with the cURL command, but keep in mind that our documentation has examples for cURL, Python, Golang, and many more. My PMM server address is

34.171.88.159

and my token

eyJrIjoiNmJ4VENyb0p0NWg1ODlONXRLT1FwN1N6YkU2SW5XMmMiLCJuIjoiYWRtaW5rZXkiLCJpZCI6MX0=

. Just replace these with yours.

In the demo below, you can see me playing with PMM API through percona-dbaas-cli tool that I created to demonstrate possible integration for your teams. The goal here is to deploy the database with API and connect to it.

Below are the basic steps describing the path from setting up PMM to deploying your first database.

Connection check

To quickly check if everything is configured correctly, let’s try to get the PMM version.

API endpoint: /v1/version

CLI tool:

percona-dbaas-cli pmm version

 

cURL:

curl -k --request GET \
     --url https://34.171.88.159/v1/version \
     --header 'Accept: application/json' \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer eyJrIjoiNmJ4VENyb0p0NWg1ODlONXRLT1FwN1N6YkU2SW5XMmMiLCJuIjoiYWRtaW5rZXkiLCJpZCI6MX0='

It should return the information about the PMM server. If you get the error, there is no way we can proceed.

In the CLI tool, if you have not configured access to the PMM, it will ask you to do it first.

Enable DBaaS in PMM

Database as a Service in PMM is in the technical preview stage at the time of writing this blog post. So we are going to enable it if you have not enabled it during the installation.

API endpoint: /v1/Settings/Change

CLI tool:

percona-dbaas-cli dbaas enable

 

cURL:

curl -k --request POST \
     --url https://34.171.88.159/v1/Settings/Change \
     --header 'Accept: application/json' \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer eyJrIjoiNmJ4VENyb0p0NWg1ODlONXRLT1FwN1N6YkU2SW5XMmMiLCJuIjoiYWRtaW5rZXkiLCJpZCI6MX0=' \
     --data '{"enable_dbaas": true}'

Now you should see the DBaaS icon in your PMM user interface and we can proceed with further steps. 

Register Kubernetes cluster

At this iteration, PMM DBaaS uses Percona Kubernetes Operators to run databases. It is required to register the Kubernetes cluster in PMM by submitting its kubeconfig.

API endpoint: /v1/management/DBaaS/Kubernetes/Register

CLI tool:

percona-dbaas-cli dbaas kubernetes-register

 

Registering k8s with cURL requires some magic. First, you will need to put kubeconfig into a variable and it should be all in one line. We have an example in our documentation:

KUBECONFIG=$(kubectl config view --flatten --minify | sed -e ':a' -e 'N' -e '$!ba' -e 's/\n/\\n/g')

curl -k --request POST \
      --url "http://34.171.88.159/v1/management/DBaaS/Kubernetes/Register" \
     --header "accept: application/json" \
     --header "authorization: Bearer eyJrIjoiNmJ4VENyb0p0NWg1ODlONXRLT1FwN1N6YkU2SW5XMmMiLCJuIjoiYWRtaW5rZXkiLCJpZCI6MX0=" \
     --data "{ \"kubernetes_cluster_name\": \"my-k8s\", \"kube_auth\": { \"kubeconfig\": \"${KUBECONFIG}\" }}"

It is much more elegant in python or other languages. We will think about how to simplify this in the following iterations.

Once the Kubernetes cluster is registered, PMM does the following:

1. Deploys Percona Operators for MySQL and for MongoDB
2. Deploys Victoria Metrics Operators, so that we can get monitoring data from the Kubernetes in PMM

Get the list of Kubernetes clusters

Mostly to check if the cluster was added successfully and if the Operators were installed.

API endpoint: /v1/management/DBaaS/Kubernetes/List

CLI tool:

percona-dbaas-cli dbaas kubernetes-list

 

cURL:

curl -k --request POST \
     --url https://34.171.88.159/v1/management/DBaaS/Kubernetes/List \
     --header 'Accept: application/json' \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer eyJrIjoiNmJ4VENyb0p0NWg1ODlONXRLT1FwN1N6YkU2SW5XMmMiLCJuIjoiYWRtaW5rZXkiLCJpZCI6MX0=' \

In the CLI tool, I decided to have a nicely formatted list of the clusters, as it is possible to have many registered in a single PMM server.

Create the database

Right now our DBaaS solutions support MySQL (based on Percona XtraDB Cluster) and MongoDB, thus there are two endpoints to create databases:

API endpoints: 

• /v1/management/DBaaS/PSMDBCluster/Create
• /v1/management/DBaaS/PXCCluster/Create

CLI tool:

percona-dbaas-cli dbaas databases-create

 

cURL: 

curl -k --request POST \
     --url https://34.171.88.159/v1/management/DBaaS/PSMDBCluster/Create \
     --header 'Accept: application/json' \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer eyJrIjoiNmJ4VENyb0p0NWg1ODlONXRLT1FwN1N6YkU2SW5XMmMiLCJuIjoiYWRtaW5rZXkiLCJpZCI6MX0=' \
     --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     --data '{"kubernetes_cluster_name": "my-k8s", \"expose\": true}'

In the experimental CLI tool, I decided to go with a single command, where the user can specify the engine with the

–engine

flag.

Notice that I also set the expose flag to true, which instructs the Operator to create a LoadBalancer Service for my cluster. It is going to be publicly exposed to the internet, not a good idea for production.

There are various other parameters that you can use to tune your database when interacting with the API.

For now, there is a certain gap between the features that Operators provide and the API. We are heading towards more flexibility, stay tuned for future releases.

Get credentials and connect

It will take some time to provision the database – in the background, Persistent Volume Claims are provisioned, the cluster is formed and networking is getting ready. You can get the list of the databases and their statuses by looking at /v1/management/DBaaS/DBClusters/List endpoint. 

We finally have the cluster up and running. It is time to get the credentials:

API endpoints:

• /v1/management/DBaaS/PXCClusters/GetCredentials
• /v1/management/DBaaS/PSMDBClusters/GetCredentials

CLI tool:

percona-dbaas-cli dbaas get-credentials

 

cURL:

curl --request POST \
     --url https://34.171.88.159/v1/management/DBaaS/PXCClusters/GetCredentials \
     --header 'Accept: application/json' \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer eyJrIjoiNmJ4VENyb0p0NWg1ODlONXRLT1FwN1N6YkU2SW5XMmMiLCJuIjoiYWRtaW5rZXkiLCJpZCI6MX0=' \
     --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     --data '{"kubernetes_cluster_name": "my-k8s","name": "my-mysql-0"}'

This will return you the endpoint to connect to, user and password. Use your favorite CLI tool or ODBC to connect to the database.

Conclusion

Automated database provisioning and management with various Database as a Service solution is becoming a minimal requirement for agile teams. Percona is committed to helping developers and operations teams to run databases anywhere. You can deploy fully open source Percona Monitoring and Management in the cloud or on-premises and provide a self-service experience to your teams not only through UI but API as well.

Right now PMM DBaaS is in technical preview and we encourage you to try it out. Feel free to tell us about your experience in our community forum.

We at Percona are committed to delivering software that enables users to run databases anywhere. Our Operators for databases and Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) Database as a Service (DBaaS) confirm our commitment to Kubernetes. Kubernetes is not only the most popular container orchestrator, but also becoming a de-facto standard for containerized workloads.

Even though we have an enterprise-grade solution to run and manage databases on Kubernetes, we still see that Kubernetes itself sometimes becomes a blocker for onboarding. We wrote a blog post some time ago about spinning up DBaaS in under 20 minutes. What if we can do it in two? This is why we partnered with a cloud-native service provider – Civo – to provide our users with a free temporary Kubernetes cluster. In this blog post, you will learn how to use it and try out our Private DBaaS solutions without the need of being a database or Kubernetes expert.

How do I get the cluster?

• Sign in to Percona Platform. If you don’t have an account yet, click Create one at the bottom of the sign-in form.
• Find “Free Kubernetes” in the menu on the left:

• Click “Launch a new cluster”. It will take less than 90 seconds to create one.
• Once the cluster is ready, you will be able to download kubeconfig – a file used to access the Civo Kubernetes cluster.

Save this file somewhere on your computer, we will need it later to register Kubernetes in PMM DBaaS. That is it, the cluster is up and running. 

Limitations

• The cluster will be automatically destroyed in three hours. It must not be used for any production workloads.
• The cluster comes with three nodes (4 CPUs, 8 GB RAM each) and does not have auto scaling enabled. It is enough for deploying a database cluster and an application.

Try DBaaS in Percona Monitoring and Management

Install PMM server

If you have a PMM server – skip this section. If not, we are going to deploy it using the quick install. You can also install PMM on Kubernetes with a helm chart by following our documentation and this blog post.

Run the following command to install PMM server on your docker compatible *nix based machine (see quick start guide for more details):

curl -fsSL https://www.percona.com/get/pmm | /bin/bash

When the script is done, the CLI tool will print a list of IP-based URLs you can put in a browser to access the PMM UI.  Copy/paste one into your favorite browser.  You may receive a security warning, there are instructions in the script output on how to bypass if you don’t get a “proceed anyway” option in your browser.  

DBaaS

You can find necessary information about how to utilize DBaaS in our documentation or this video. In general there are few steps:

1. At the time of writing this blog post, DBaaS is in technical preview. Do not forget to enable it in Settings -> Advanced Settings.
2. Register the Kubernetes cluster in the DBaaS using the kubeconfig generated in the Portal
3. Deploy your first database

Your database will be ready in a few minutes, you will get the endpoint to connect to and the username and password. By default the database is not exposed publicly and reachable only within the Kubernetes cluster. You can change it in the Advanced Options when creating the database.

With ‘Free Kubernetes’ we want to simplify PMM DBaaS onboarding and we also want to bring value to our community of users. It is the first version and we plan to deliver more enhancements to provide even more exciting onboarding. It would be great if you could help us to find those improvements by submitting your feedback at platform_portal@percona.com. Please spend a couple of minutes and let us know what problems or improvements you would like to see in your PMM DBaaS and Kubernetes journey. 

My father always used the expression, “sometimes the juice ain’t worth the squeeze”. What he meant by it was, “what you put into something better be worth what you get out of it”. Why do I bring this up?  Well…we’ve got this GREAT feature for Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) we’ve been banging away on: PMM DBaaS (Database as a Service).  Using it for only 30 minutes, you can see it has the potential to change the way teams think about providing database services while controlling cost and minimizing complexity.  But it’s a major pain in the ass to get all set up to first realize that value…and we want to change that!

TLDR: YES! I’ve been wanting to try out DBaaS, but have no desire to become a Kubernetes expert just to see it! Skip to the good stuff! 

Quick history.  Our DBaaS (Database as a Service) offering is designed to be resilient and performant…after all, we’re kind of known for being able to beat databases into high-performance submission.  So when considering the backends to help us deliver performance, scalability, reliability, and more, we settled on Kubernetes as the starting point thanks to its scalability, resiliency, and orchestration capabilities out of the box!  We released a preview release about a year ago and have been adding features and functionality to it ever since. 

Getting Past Setup Kubernetes

I’m lucky enough to get to talk to all kinds of users that are begging for a solution with the flexibility of your public cloud DBaaS but without racking up tens of thousands of dollars of bills a month, or that need to maintain tight control of their data, or who have moved a ton of workload to the cloud and have racks of servers just sitting there.  I tell them about what we’ve built and encourage them to try it out. All of them get excited to hear what it can do and are eager to give it a try!  So I give them some time and follow up a few weeks later…nothing.  I encourage them to make the time, follow up a few weeks later…nothing?  Challenge them as to why not when they admit they’re losing precious cycles on silly operations that users should just be able to do on their own and the number one response is “Kubernetes is too confusing for me and I could never get past Step 1: Setup Kubernetes”.  Not. Good!  

I’ve used our DBaaS on numerous occasions…mostly just on my laptop with minikube.  There’s a drawback with minikube; you must have a powerhouse of a machine to be able to use DBaaS and PMM on the same machine to play around with it; not to mention weights and chains to keep your laptop from flying away when the fans go nuts!  The best way to poke around DBaaS is with some cheap public cloud infrastructure!  So I figured I’d give it a try…our docs show what looks like “three easy steps”, but failed to mention the prerequisite 20 steps if you don’t already have eksctl and other tools installed/configured . It was more work than I budgeted time for, but I decided to push through; determined to get an EKS cluster up and running!  I threw in the towel after about five hours one Saturday…defeated.  It wasn’t just getting the cluster up, it was all the hoops and tricks and rules and roles and permissions needed to do anything with that cluster.  That’s five hours of squeeze and still no juice!

So I did what all smart engineers do…found a smarter engineer!  Sergey and I decided there was a real opportunity to make DBaaS available to a wider range of users…those who were not AWS Level 8 Samurais with PhDs in Kubernetes and the goal was simple: “Be able to use PMM’s DBaaS in 10 minutes or less…starting from nothing!”  We have not quite hit the 10-minute mark, but we DID hit the 18-minute mark…and 16 of those 18 minutes are spent watching paint dry as the tiny robots of CloudFormation get you a suitable cluster up and running.  But when it’s done, there’s no messing with IAM roles or Load Balancers or VPCs…just copy/paste, and use!

Wanna Try DBaaS?

You’re going to need your AWS Access Key ID and your AWS Secret Access Key for a root user…so get that before you start the timer (here is a handy guide to getting them if you don’t already have them safely stored somewhere).  You will also need a Linux system to set up your PMM server on and make the needed calls to get your K8s cluster up and running (this has only been tested on CentOS and Ubuntu).  

As any user with sudo, run: 

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shoffman-percona/easyK8s/main/easyK8s-aws.sh | bash -s -- <AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID> <AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>

You can optionally add an AWS region at the end of that if you want something other than us-east-2 (default).

While this is running (~16 min) you can go right to the PMM installation.  In a new tab/terminal window and run the following (user with sudo privileges):

curl -fsSL https://www.percona.com/get/pmm | /bin/bash

When the script is done, the CLI tool will print a list of IP-based URLs you can put in a browser to access the PMM UI.  Copy/paste one into your favorite browser.  You may receive a security warning, there are instructions in the script output on how to bypass if you don’t get a “proceed anyway” option in your browser.    

Log in to PMM’s UI, the default username/password is admin/admin and you’ll be prompted to change the password.  

To turn on DBaaS you’ll need to click the gear icon , followed by “Settings”.  On the PMM settings page, click on “Advanced Settings” and scroll down to the “Technical Preview features” section, and toggle DBaaS on.  While you’re here, fill in the Public Address using the “Get from Browser” button.  This makes automatic monitoring that much easier later. Click “Apply Changes” and you’ll see the screen refresh and a new icon will appear of a database . Click it to get to the DBaaS main page…but you’ll most likely be holding here as the infrastructure is probably still setting up.  Take advantage of the opportunity to stand up, stretch your leg, maybe grab a drink!

Once the cluster setup is completed, you can Copy/Paste from the ####BEGIN KUBECONFIG#### comment to the ####END KUBECONFIG#### comment. Switch over to the PMM DBaaS UI on the Kubernetes Cluster tab click “Register New Kubernetes Cluster”.  Name your new cluster and paste the config in the bottom window…it’ll take a second and your PMM server will install both Percona XtraDB Cluster and Percona Server for MongoDB operators and enable the DB Cluster tab where you can create and size DBs of your choosing!  

That’s it!  If all the complicated setup has held you back from taking DBaaS for a test drive, hopefully this will give you “more juice for your squeeze”!  We’d love to hear feedback on what we’ve built for so far so feel free to leave a comment here or offer an improvement in our jira instance under the PMM project.  Our main objective is to take the complication out of getting a database up and running for your application development process and being able to create MySQL and MongoDB databases in one place (PostgreSQL coming soon).  When you’re done playing, you can unregister the Kubernetes from PMM then log in to your AWS account, and delete both stacks (eksctl-pmmDBaaS-nodes-XXX and eksctl-pmmDBaaS-cluster) in the Cloudformation app for the region you chose (or us-east-2 if you left the default).  

Install a database server. Give the application team an endpoint. Set up backups and monitor in perpetuity. This is a pattern I hear about regularly from DBAs with most of my enterprise clients. Rarely do they get to troubleshoot or work with application teams to tune queries or design schemas. This is what triggers the interest in a DBaaS platform from database administrators.

What is DBaaS?

DBaaS stands for “Database as a Service”. When this acronym is thrown out, the first thought is generally a cloud offering such as RDS. While this is a very commonly used service, a DBaaS is really just a managed database platform that offloads much of the operational burden from the DBA team. Tasks handled by the platform include:

• Installing the database software
• Configuring the database
• Setting up backups
• Managing upgrades
• Handling failover scenarios

A common misconception is that a DBaaS is limited to the public cloud. As many enterprises already have large data centers and heavy investments in hardware, an on-premise DBaaS can also be quite appealing. Keeping the database in-house is often favored when the hardware and resources are already available. In addition, there are extra compliance and security concerns when looking at a public cloud offering.

DBaaS also represents a difference in mindset. In conventional deployments, systems and architecture are often designed in very exotic ways making automation a challenge. With a DBaaS, automation, standardization, and best practices are the priority. While this can be seen as limiting flexibility, this approach can lead to larger and more robust infrastructures that are much easier to manage and maintain.

Why is DBaaS Appealing?

From a DBA perspective (and being a former DBA myself), I always enjoyed working on more challenging issues. Mundane operations like launching servers and setting up backups make for a less-than-exciting daily work experience. When managing large fleets, these operations make up the majority of the work.

As applications grow more complex and data sets grow rapidly, it is much more interesting to work with the application teams to design and optimize the data tier. Query tuning, schema design, and workflow analysis are much more interesting (and often beneficial) when compared to the basic setup. DBAs are often skilled at quickly identifying issues and understanding design issues before they become problems.

When an enterprise adopts a DBaaS model, this can free up the DBAs to work on more complex problems. They are also able to better engage and understand the applications they are supporting. A common comment I get when discussing complex tickets with clients is: “well, I have no idea what the application is doing, but we have an issue with XYZ”. If this could be replaced with a detailed understanding from the design phase to the production deployment, these discussions would be very different.

From an application development perspective, a DBaaS is appealing because new servers can be launched much faster. Ideally, with development or production deployment options, an application team can have the resources they need ready in minutes rather than days. It greatly speeds up the development life cycle and makes developers much more self-reliant.

DBaaS Options

While this isn’t an exhaustive list, the main options when looking to move to a DBaaS are:

• Public cloud
  • Amazon RDS, Microsoft Azure SQL, etc
• Private/Internal cloud
  • Kubernetes (Percona DBaaS), VMWare, etc
• Custom provisioning/operations on bare-metal

Looking at public cloud options for a DBaaS, security and compliance are generally the first concern. While they are incredibly easy to launch and generally offer some pay-as-you-go options, managing access is a major consideration.

Large enterprises with existing hardware investments often want to explore a private DBaaS. I’ve seen clients work to create their own tooling within their existing infrastructure. While this is a viable option, it can be very time-consuming and require many development cycles. Another alternative is to use an existing DBaaS solution. For example, Percona currently has a DBaaS deployment as part of Percona Monitoring and Management in technical preview. The Percona DBaaS automates PXC deployments and management tasks on Kubernetes through a user-friendly UI.

Finally, a custom deployment is just what it sounds like. I have some clients that manage fleets (1000s of servers) of bare metal servers with heavy automation and custom scripting. To the end-user, it can look just like a normal DBaaS (an endpoint with all operations hidden). On the backend, the DBA team spends significant time just supporting the infrastructure.

How Can Percona help?

Percona works to meet your business where you are. If that is supporting Percona Server for MySQL on bare metal or a fleet of RDS instances, we can help. If your organization is leveraging Kubernetes for the data tier, the Percona Private DBaaS is a great option to standardize and simplify your deployments while following best practices. We can help from the design phase through the entire life cycle. Let us know how we can help!