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Exploring OpenStack's Trove DBaaS

Cloud Service

Article from ADMIN 35/2016

By Martin Loschwitz

DBaaS moves the database service to the cloud, promising a new database instance at the click of a mouse.

You can install databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or even MongoDB very quickly thanks to package management, but the installation is not even half the battle. A functioning database also needs user accounts and several configuration steps for better performance and security.

This need for additional configuration poses challenges in cloud environments. You can always manually install a virtual machine in traditional settings, but cloud users want to generate an entire virtual environment from a template. Manual intervention is difficult or sometimes even impossible.

Furthermore, the customer isn't supposed to be troubled with setting up the database in today's IT environment. Users expect to be able to set up a service in the cloud with a mouse click.

These considerations have led to the development of a new class of tools that fall under the name Database as a Service (DBaaS). The aim of DBaaS is to make it as easy as possible for cloud customers to use a database. Amazon has used the DBaaS function in its cloud for years, and cloud solutions like OpenStack now have similar features. In this article, I present OpenStack's Trove DBaaS solution.

Trove [1] has been around for many years already. The service didn't have it easy to start with, and the developers needed several attempts to get Trove accepted as an official part of the OpenStack program. The declared goal of Trove is to hide the full technical substructure of a database from the users. Customers just need a database; how that database is implemented in the background remains hidden.

The Architecture of the solution

The Trove design follows the guidelines used for other OpenStack services: The solution consists of an API and a component that executes commands in the background and sends them to the API. Like all OpenStack APIs, the Trove API follows

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