Cloudreach Voices - The Cloud: What Does it Mean for your Current Applications

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Cloudreach Voices: The Cloud and What it means for your Enterprise Applications
Copyright ©2016 Cloudreach Limited
The Cloud: What does
it mean for your
current applications?
Andrew Philp, DevOps Lead, Cloudreach Edinburgh
February 2016

Copyright ©2015 Cloudreach limitedCopyright ©2016 Cloudreach Limited
You may be running applications like SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server if
you look after a Windows environment, or MySQL, Tomcat, Apache and
MongoDB if you’re looking after a Linux environment.
Let’s use Microsoft SQL Server as an example. In the on-premise world, you’
d perform a capacity plan, finding out how much resource you need to
dedicate to each database and any special requirements. You’d then place
an order for a server, or ask your team to create you a VM with the
required amount of IOPS, CPU, bandwidth and so on.
How does this differ in the Cloud?
What are you running?

The real answer is it doesn’t. You still need to plan, implement and
maintain the same way you would on-premise. The real magic happens
when you want to adjust the amount of resources dedicated to one
database.
On-premise, you’re most likely going to over-provision your resources to
ensure there’s never a surge that exceeds your available capacity. In the
Cloud, you can provision towards how much capacity you’ll need most
often, rather than over-provisioning.
The Cloud:
A magic pill for the enterprise?

One great service that can help you do this is Elastic Database Pools in
Microsoft Azure SQL.
This service allows you to specify a number of DTUs or “Database
Throughput Units” which give you the ability to cover surges in capacity,
then scale the performance back to where you need it once the surge is
over.
It also means you can start developing an application using a low price
tier of Azure SQL, then move it up to a Standard or Premium tier with no
customer downtime.
Cloud Services that can
make this happen

Another service that can help achieve this is Amazon Relational
Database Service, or “RDS” for short.
Although lacking the granular ability to scale performance like Azure
SQL, you are still able to resize according to demand.
Using the best practice Multi-AZ option, downtime is reduced to a
matter of minutes.
Cloud Services that can
make this happen

In the Cloud, you have to remember that these “magic” solutions
carry a cost benefit when used correctly.
Rather than over-provisioning and paying for the extra capacity
all the time, you can closely follow your demand and scale
accordingly.
This means when the database is least used, you pay less and when
you need more performance you only pay for that extra performance
when required - usually on an hourly basis.
Cost Implications for these services

Even if you need a Microsoft SQL Server with SQL Server Agent
available, this is an option in the Cloud.
You can easily run it on a VM or EC2 instance (major Cloud
providers actually give you an image with SQL installed which is
charged at a higher hourly rate to cover the licensing costs) with the
same amount of control over settings that you would have on-premise.
I really need “full fat” Microsoft
SQL Server!

to build clusters, AlwaysOn Availability
Groups or even use good old fashioned
mirroring or log shipping.
Running SQL Server on a VM also means you can have more architectural
choice over where files are stored, for example a best practice Cloudreach
follow in Amazon EC2 is to:
Ensure tempdb is on ephemeral storage for best performance, there is no need
to ensure this data is retained after a reboot as SQL Server rebuilds it as
required
Ensure the Transaction Log is on the fastest storage available, usually
Provisioned IOPS
Ensure that the data files are on quick storage, usually General Purpose SSD
This allows you...

All these great solutions make it easier than ever
to get exceptional performance
to save money
to work effectively in the Cloud
Magic still needs a DBA

with hosted database engines in the Cloud, such as Amazon RDS or
Azure SQL, is that the fundamental job of a DBA still exists.
DBAs must ensure they perform the same steps that they would in
an on-premise environment in terms of sizing Transaction Logs
appropriately, ensuring tables have the correct indexes and making
sure not to overload a database instance with too many heavily used
databases.
The most important thing to remember

Oh, and don’t
forget backups!

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