This is a guest blog by Amrith Kumar.  Amrith is co-founder of Tesora, and the Project Technical Lead (PTL) for the OpenStack Trove project. Amrith brings more than two decades of experience delivering industry-leading products for companies specializing in enterprise storage applications, fault tolerant high performance systems and massively parallel databases to Tesora.

OpenStack is the leading open source cloud operating systems that power the datacenters of the world’s largest companies, and is one of the fastest growing open source communities in the world.  The Tesora Database as a Service (DBaaS) Platform is open-source software (based on Trove, the OpenStack DBaaS Service) that provides a framework for provisioning and managing a number of popular databases within OpenStack clouds. OpenStack software controls pools of compute, storage and networking resources throughout your IT infrastructure, and allows you to manage these resources through a graphical user interface (GUI), a Command Line Interface (CLI) or an Application Programming Interface (API).

DBaaS solutions considerably simplify database management while reducing costs and risks. The key value of a DBaaS solution is how it can automate the operational tasks involved in provisioning and managing databases through their lifecycle.

The Tesora DBaaS Platform supports several SQL and NoSQL databases including Couchbase and Couchbase Enterprise Edition (EE). It plugs into your OpenStack cloud and uses the services provided by Nova, Cinder, Swift, Glance, Keystone and Neutron, the core storage, compute and networking services in OpenStack. It exposes a database agnostic API (Trove-API) and allows users to provision and manage a diverse set of database instances which run on compute infrastructure provisioned through Nova, using persistent block storage from Cinder, and networking from Neutron. Database images (called Guest Images) are stored on Glance and all identity and access management to access Trove are controlled with credentials stored in Keystone. This is illustrated in the diagram below.

Let us look now at the benefits of a DBaaS solution in detail.

Provisioning

The Tesora DBaaS Platform allows users to provision databases with a simple API, a CLI or a GUI. Importantly, the same API call is used to provision databases, regardless of the database. Similarly, the commands to launch a database instance are the same no matter the database. This considerably simplifies the process of provisioning a database instance.

Users can provision single instances of a database, as well as replicated instances, or clusters. The Tesora DBaaS platform takes care of the database specific operations necessary to setup replication and clustering.

Users specify the size (called the flavor) of the compute infrastructure, the storage and networking resources for the database.

Resizing

Users can resize the flavor of the database instance, or the storage associated with the database at any time. In addition, users can manipulate the topology of replication and clustering, adding or removing replicas and cluster instances.

Users can perform all of these operations with simple API call; the DBaaS Platform takes care of the database specific operations for these resizing operations.

Configuration Management

The Tesora DBaaS Platform provides a simplified model for managing database configurations. Operators of the DBaaS Platform can specify a set of configuration parameters that users can employ to define groups of configuration options and then associate these settings to database instances. This capability dramatically simplifies the management of databases, improves security and reduces risk in operating large fleets of databases.

Other capabilities

The DBaaS Platform also automates backup and restore, upgrade, license management, and a number of other management tasks. Importantly, each of these capabilities is exposed via a database agnostic API, CLI and GUI, simplifying the usage of databases in the enterprise.

Tesora DBaaS Platform support for Couchbase

As described earlier, support is available for Couchbase v3.0, v4.0 and v4.1 Enterprise Edition*. Users can provision single instances or clusters and this makes the Tesora DBaaS Platform ideally suited for both development and production workloads.

Conclusion

DBaaS solutions considerably simplify the management of databases while also reducing costs and risks. The Tesora DBaaS Platform provides these benefits to users of the OpenStack cloud and supports several SQL and NoSQL databases including Couchbase and Couchbase Enterprise Edition (EE). For more details about Tesora, visit http://www.tesora.com where you can download evaluation copies of our Enterprise Edition Software and documentation.

If you are attending the OpenStack Summit in Austin Texas, visit booth A26 and learn more about the Tesora DBaaS Platform’s support for Couchbase.