White Paper DATABASES IN THE CLOUD HOW VIRTUALIZATION AND AUTOMATION ENABLE TRUE DBAAS Jeff Stonacek, House of Brick Technologies Jim Hannan, House of Brick Technologies Kris Cook, SITA 402.445.0764 | 877.780.7038 |www.houseofbrick.com 9300 Underwood Ave. Suite 300 | Omaha, NE 68114 © Copyright 2015 House of Brick Technologies, LLC. This document may not be copied or reproduced White Paper Databases in the Cloud Abstract Everyone is talking about Cloud Computing, but there seems to be wildly differing perspectives on what it means, how it works, and the costs and benefits of such a model. When it comes to databases and other business critical applications in the cloud, the message is even more confusing. In this paper, we will share our lessons learned while helping some of the biggest companies in the world with their Cloud and Database as a Service (DBaaS) strategies. We will also share best practices and success stories around automating the provisioning and deployment of fully customized, complex application environments based on Oracle core database technology. Authors: • Jeff Stonacek, House of Brick Technologies - Principal Architect • Jim Hannan, House of Brick Technologies - Principal Architect • Kristopher Cook, SITA - Senior Manager, Database Services Other Contributors: • Nathan Biggs, House of Brick Technologies - CEO Target Audience • IT Architects • Technical Administrators • IT Management • Business Unit Application Owners Executive Summary This presentation is not merely a description of tooling reQuired to automate database deployments. DBaaS involves much more than that. DBaaS requires a culture change for most traditional IT shops. There are organizational and political concerns along with the licensing, security and technical automation components. Organizational Concerns • IT cannot operate in silos • IT and business units must agree on a service catalog • Need to embrace virtualization • Business units have more infrastructure power 2 © Copyright 2015 House of Brick Technologies, LLC. White Paper Databases in the Cloud DbaaS Key Points DBaaS has the following characteristics, public or private cloud: • Consumer driven • Utility pricing • Elastic • Self service • Automation Industry Tooling Oracle Corporation has developed tools to enable DBaaS, as have other vendors. In this presentation we will compare and contrast Oracle's DBaaS offering with that of VMware. Each has its benefits and drawbacks. Oracle • Based on OEM 12c Cloud Control • Oracle pushes their proprietary hardware platform, which is not virtualization friendly • Tooling gap is on the IaaS side, difficult to provide IaaS with Exadata • Oracle tooling revolves around Oracle products VMware Since the release of vSphere 4, VMware has been developing tooling to do both IaaS and DBaaS. The first product they introduced was VMware vFabric Data Director in August of 2011. This product was able to offer a service catalog of T-shirt sized Oracle Database appliances—small, medium and large. The word appliance was used due to the fact that the database virtual machine was difficult to modify and the only supported configuration was done through the web UI. With the release of vCloud Automation Center 2 years ago, VMware took the industry a giant step forward with IaaS. vCloud Automation Center has since been rebranded by VMware as vRealize Automation. It is now included in the vRealize Suite. • Based on virtualized infrastructure • Supports a hybrid mix of multiple cloud platforms (vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services, Open Stack, etc.) • x86 hardware agnostic • Relies heavily on vRealize Suite of products, as well as custom workflows for automation • Tooling gap is after the deployment of the virtual machine or DBaaS 3 © Copyright 2015 House of Brick Technologies, LLC. White Paper Databases in the Cloud • VMware’s DBaaS and IaaS vRealize strategies can be adopted for most applications (not just Oracle) Background Cloud computing is a hot topic in the IT industry. It has spawned a revolution in the fields of infrastructure and provisioning. Since House of Brick is heavily invested in providing services around virtualizing tier 1 workloads, it made sense to delve into the service model. In this paper we will discuss the automated service model for delivering IT components. In other words, providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Database as a Service (DBaaS) and Application as a Service (AaaS). Definitions Lets first provide some definitions for the common acronyms found today. IaaS Calling something Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can be a bit misleading. It is difficult to automate the provisioning of a core network switch, for example. When referring to IaaS, we are typically talking about the low level components necessary for running an application. Standing up a server is a prereQuisite to running a database. Automating the provisioning of that server, including installing and configuring operating system (OS) components, constitutes IaaS. Virtualization is THE key enabler of IaaS. PaaS Another acronym that can be a bit ambiguous is Platform as a Service (PaaS). This refers to the process of providing a computing platform on which to run an application. Things like Java middleware frameworks would be a good example of PaaS. DBaaS Database as a Service (DBaaS) seems like the easiest term to Quantify, as anything reQuired standing up a database. In the case of Oracle, that means satisfying prereQuisites, adding storage, installing binaries and creating a database. DBaaS is really a component of PaaS. 4 © Copyright 2015 House of Brick Technologies, LLC. White Paper Databases in the Cloud SaaS Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are those that consumers access over the Internet, such as Salesforce.com. SaaS applications are sold “by the slice”, so that consumers pay for only those units that they use (such as number of users on Salesforce). The Cloud Model The service model has certain characteristics that make it work. However, many of them go against the traditional IT operating model, which must be addressed to make Cloud Computing possible. Consumer Driven Consumers drive the cloud model. Consumers are usually associated with the following groups: • Development teams • Application teams • Operations • Business unit owners The idea behind Cloud computing is to satisfy the consumers without increasing infrastructure operations and related costs. The service provider, public or private, may own the infrastructure but the consumers own the application and business processes that consume the infrastructure. Consumer driven implies self-service. In other words, the consumer makes decisions regarding which environments are needed, when they should be delivered, and the performance characteristics. Infrastructure teams must approve all reQuests, but the consumers run the show. Workflow The Cloud model is predicated upon an automated workflow engine. An automated workflow engine has the following characteristics: • Communication mechanism (send a page, email, etc.) • Approval mechanism • Automated task initiation 5 © Copyright 2015 House of Brick Technologies, LLC. White Paper Databases in the Cloud IT organizations have a long history of utilizing workflow engines however; they were typically more informal in nature. For example, an application team would call the server team to reQuest a new server for a software project. In the Cloud model, this communication stream must be automated or the system comes grinding to a halt. With infrastructure and operations teams potentially located around the globe, communications can come to a grinding halt if there isn't a framework in place to keep things moving along. Approvals automatically initiate the next level of communication, and so forth. The critical piece to an automated workflow framework is task initiation. Once the DBA manager approves the reQuest for a new database, the workflow engine should take on the task of creating the service. The only manual task necessary should be reading the email that states the environment is ready for use. Service Catalog A service catalog defines what offerings are available to the consumer. The hard part is defining the components (i.e. application server, database, etc.) and the configuration that will satisfy the reQuest. The components of the service catalog must be very granular in nature. Once built though, the process of deploying becomes the job of the Cloud Management software. While this is a technology solution, there is Quite a bit of human intervention reQuired to properly construct the service catalog. Utility Pricing The utility pricing model drives the Cloud. When reQuesting resources from a public cloud provider, the consumer pays by the unit. That unit may be CPU consumption, memory consumption, IOPs, etc. In a private cloud, there needs to be a charge back model in place where groups in an organization have a budget for resources and are charged based on their consumption. If not, consumption runs rampant and licensing costs can skyrocket. Elasticity The Cloud Computing model relies on capacity on demand. Certain projects and activities reQuire bursty capacity. A good example is patching. If an application reQuires a patch, it may be necessary to stand up a new environment (AaaS) and apply the patch for testing. Once the patch is promoted to production the environment can be destroyed. 6 © Copyright 2015 House of Brick Technologies, LLC. White Paper Databases in the Cloud Automation Automation, again, is the key to making all of these