Open Enterprise: The PostgreSQL Open Source Database Blog from EnterpriseDB » cloud

Give Me My Own Cloud

Jim Mlodgenski — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:54:40 +0000

I’ve recently attended several Cloud Computing forums and panels, and the general feeling throughout most of the audience has been that the promise of Cloud Computing sounds great, but many organizations are still apprehensive about moving to a public cloud such as Amazon’s EC2. This is understandable given security concerns and just the general feeling of a lack of control, so the concept of private clouds becomes a great solution. It allows organizations to use the power of Cloud Computing without ever leaving the friendly confines of their own data center. There are many products that enable this such as VMWare’s vShere and the open source product Eucalyptus with many more on the way. When you look at this architecturally, this really is the next generation of virtualization giving administrators more power to efficiently use their physical resources.

The other interesting trend was the types of applications organizations are considering for use in the cloud. While there is much talk about replatforming existing application onto Cloud Computing infrastructures, many organizations seem to people getting their feet wet with new applications. They seem to be fairly traditional applications and not leveraging the elasticity of the cloud and they are just leveraging the financial benefits of not needed to procure new hardware. This trend show a lot of great promise for PostgreSQL given that Oracle does not have a favorable licensing model in virtualized environments. While Oracle is expensive in traditional environments, much of the cost benefits are eroded when Oracle is needed in a cloud environment. This is leading many people to open source solutions and PostgreSQL is a natural fit for many Oracle users.

Give Me My Own Cloud

Automating Cloud Deployments

Jim Mlodgenski — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:58:07 +0000

One of the promises of Cloud Computing is the ease of spinning up new instances and adding them to an existing application allowing for elasticity, but actually doing that in practice is anything but simple. Increasing the complexity would be adding another dimension of wanting to accomplish this across multiple cloud vendors. This is important for some SAAS vendors that want redundancy or just for organizations wanting to avoid vendor lock-in. An open source project by Red Hat called DeltaCloud shows the promise of on day allowing this, but the functionality of actually configuring a running instance is not addressed. RightScale has a number of Ruby Gems that addresses the same problem as DeltaCloud, but again, it falls short on configuring a running instance. These two projects will probably progress together since DeltaCloud actually uses the RightScale Gems under the covers. A project that handles configuring running instances well is Cloud Tools which powers Cloud Foundry for SpringSource. Cloud Tools provides a simple way to configure running instances in complex deployments which even includes setting up replication between 2 database servers. The downside is that it only works for Amazon’s EC2. Since all of the projects are open, jamming them together could be a powerful combination and may be necessary as cloud deployments become more complex across providers.

Automating Cloud Deployments

Streaming PostgreSQL into the Cloud

Jim Mlodgenski — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:43:25 +0000

The recent Streaming Replication patch committed to the PostgreSQL source tree is the potential killer feature that can catapult PostgreSQL into a prominent position in the cloud computing landscape. This combined with Hot Standby fills a major void in PostgreSQL by providing a replication solution native to the core engine and allows for a horizontally scalable solution without any bolt ons. This is a key piece of functionality to leverage the elasticity promise of compute clouds. While it has always been possible to use replication with PostgreSQL, integrating this into the core will allow new PostgreSQL users to easily use replication without feeling overwhelmed by learning Slonik scripts. What is most exciting about this is the timing of when this is all happening. With the uncertainty of the future of MySQL, there are more people than ever looking at PostgreSQL and one of the biggest historical knocks on PostgreSQL is the lack of an integrated replication solution. This is huge as this new audience starts to look at PostgreSQL and realize that PostgreSQL can more than fit their needs as an open source database instead of MySQL.

Streaming PostgreSQL into the Cloud

Does PostgreSQL Run in the Cloud?

Jim Mlodgenski — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:03:45 +0000

Cloud Computing is the new big wave in the Information technology industry, but it is an amorphous term that is commonly misunderstood. I talk to people everyday who are confused by the Cloud, but Cloud Computing is simply a shared computing resource and has actually been part of the IT landscape for many years. The Cloud Computing ecosystem can be split into three categories, Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SaaS can be considered the first major breakthrough in what is considered Cloud Computing today with services such as Salesforce.com and email hosting like Gmail and Hotmail. PaaS evolved out of the success of successful SaaS offering and spawned platforms allowing users to enhance SaaS offerings with platforms like the Google App Engine and Force.com. The latest category of Cloud Computing of IaaS is driving the excitement. This includes Storage Clouds and most importantly Compute Clouds. Compute Clouds are shared environments providing virtualized Operating Systems allowing users a platform to deploy applications with greater control over the resources and the ability to deploy the applications of their choice. These Compute Clouds are where PostgreSQL can be used to back any sort of application you would run inside a traditional data center. These different types of Clouds and the use of the common Cloud Computing terminology among them leads to the confusion of what Cloud Computing really is and ultimately leads to the common question I hear “Does PostgreSQL run in the Cloud?”…Of course it does…

Does PostgreSQL Run in the Cloud?

Scaling Postgres Plus Advanced Server in the Cloud

Scott Mead — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:46:35 +0000

The idea behind the ‘elastic’ cloud is that you can simply ’stretch’ your wasteband by adding more junk in your trunk, i.e. putting more servers online to give you the ability to scale. The biggest problem here, however, is the simple fact that Postgres really operates on a ’shared-nothing’ architecture, so how is it that we gain anything by simply adding more resources? That is, how does Postgres become elastic without changing the application or doing massive architecture work?

Right off the bat, I’ll attempt to eliminate confusion. The following describes a feature specific to EnterpriseDB’s proprietary product, Postgres Plus Advanced Server, and, specifically, InfiniteCache.

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Scaling Postgres Plus Advanced Server in the Cloud