From Daniel Morris in the OpenStack developer mailing list comes a new incubation project announcement…
Today Rackspace is announcing the introduction of Database as a Service (Project RedDwarf) for a possible affiliated OpenStack incubation project.
To give you some background, Database as a Service is a scalable relational database service that allows users toquickly and easily utilize the features of a relational database without the burden of handling complex administrative tasks. With this service, cloud users and database administrators can provision and manage multiple database instances as needed.
Initially, our plan is for the service to focus on providing resource isolation at high performance while automating complex administrative tasks including deployment, configuration, patching, backups, restores, and monitoring. Some of the key features for the first release are listed below:
- Single tenant MySQL instance with unlimited databasesper instance
- Public API’s to create, read, update, and delete databases and database users
- User and database access management with root user access
- Scale database instance memory sizes up and down
- Scale up storage sizes
- Database backups and restores
- Instance migrations
- Instance metrics and monitoring
This represents our current thinking for a first release, and we welcome feedback from the community on any suggested features.
While still in the early stages of development, the service is already tightly integrated with OpenStack Compute (Nova). We chose Nova because the component-based architecture and open standards make it the perfect virtualization layer for our product platform. The compute layer provides the reusable and deployable services needed to build an extensible service deployment foundation that will be used to deliver not only a MySQL database service, but also many other services in the future.
The initial architecture of this service is being designed around several technologies listed below
- Open Stack Compute (Nova)
- OpenVZ – OpenVZ is a container based virtualization technology that ensures guaranteed resource minimums and maximums delivering exceptional performance from a MySQL server, comparable to a bare metal box.
- Guest Agent – The guest agent is the management interface to the container (VM). All operations originating from the Cloud Databases API use the guest to manipulate the container.
More details can be found on the blueprint and wiki, please take a look, get involved, and provide any comments or feedback you may have. Also, join us during our session at the OpenStack Design Summit in Santa Clara April 26th – 29th to learn more about our approach, ask questions and become active in the project! We are excited about working with the community as we continue to develop relational databases in the cloud.
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