The Database As A Service

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

A Marketplace Assessment

Developing content for cloud

Submitted To: Submitted By :

Michael Gleeson Ashima Bhalla

Nikhil Krishna Swayampakala

Contents

Topic

The topic for the research for the project is "Database as a Service – A market place assessment" which will focus on a new service stream coming up for databases moving to cloud by many of the cloud providers. The project will have the comparison of the various databases as service providers in terms of their Sizing, Security considerations and performance but the major focus will remain on bringing out the difference in the pricing model based on our own usage of the service provided by Amazon RDS and Microsoft Azure SQL.

Aims and Objectives

The interest that drives me to do a research on this topic is that in the previous semester we have mainly focused on the service areas of platform as a service, software as a service and Infrastructure as a service. The Database as a service was an area which was not studied in detail. In addition to it the recent announcement of Amazon.com's Redshift  makes it clear we're moving to a future where some or even most of our data will exist in public clouds.

Aim:

To do a market assessment of the cloud providers providing Database as a service.

Objective:

To do a market place assessment of the cloud providers providing Database as a service that will include Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon EC2, Amazon MySQL Relational Database Service, Google apps Data store, Microsoft SQL Azure.

To understand the offerings of different companies in terms of their data storage on cloud by bring out the differences between them in terms of:

Data sizing.

Security considerations

Performance.

To bring out the difference in pricing models based on our own direct usage of the service provided by Amazon RDS and Microsoft Azure SQL.

Background on general subject area selected

This research will basically contain the information discussed about the new transactional "database-as-a-service" (DBaaS) also known as Relational Cloud.

The early efforts for DBaaS were made by some big companies like Amazon RDS and Microsoft SQL Azure. They promised to establish their service to meet the new market need for databases. The relational cloud basically makes an effort to shift the burden of backing up data, privacy, performance tuning, and configuration etc from the users of databases to the database service providers. In the relational database model the provider hosts the client’s data. The client is allowed to access the data through internet. The service basically brings out some significant benefits to clients by managing their data.

Deployment Methods

Virtual machine - To run a database the uses can run the database on virtual machine. The users can purchase an instance of a virtual machine for a specific period of time. This can be done in two ways either the user can use readymade machine image that already has pre included database installed or can use their own machine image and install database on it. For example, on Amazon EC2 Oracle provides a readymade machine image with an installation of Oracle database 11g.

Database as a service – In this service there is no physical installation of virtual machine for creating a database. The user doesn’t have to maintain the database on their own. The provider for database takes the responsibility for installing and maintaining the database. The owner of the application pays according to the usage. For example: Amazon Web Service.

Advantages of DBaaS:

Firstly, since the resource the users will be using will be shared so the incurred cost by the users will be much lower. The cost is likely to be less as they will not be running the entire system themselves.

Secondly, the bottom line principle of paying for DBaaS is the principle for other cloud computing services that is "pay-as-you-go". For DBaaS it applies to both ongoing cost as well as licensing of the software.

The DBaaS centralizes and automates the entire process for database so going forward it even reduces the administrative cost and performs above expectation

Vendors:

Virtual Machine Deployment

Database as a service

SQL Data Model

Oracle Database

IBM DB2

Ingres (database)

PostgreSQL

Amazon Relational Database Service (MySQL)

Microsoft SQL Azure (MS SQL)

Clustrix Database as a Service

Xeround Cloud Database - MySQL front-end

EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus Cloud Database

Non SQL Data model

CouchDB on Amazon EC2

Hadoop on Amazon EC2

Apache Cassandra on Amazon EC2

Neo4J on Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon SimpleDB

Cloudant Data Layer (CouchDB)

Database.com by SalesForce

Google App Engine Datastore

Cloud vendors being considered for research:

Amazon RDS—Amazon’s MySQL RDS offering provides an implementation of MySQL on a virtual operating system.

Amazon SimpleDB—Amazon’s SimpleDB is a NoSQL database offering that provides users with an application programming interface (API) for writing and reading data. SimpleDB is automatically configured in their base service offering to copy data across Amazon Web Service’s (AWS’s) availability zones for redundancy

Amazon S3: Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Microsoft SQL Azure—Microsoft SQL Azure is a relational database management system (RDBMS) product offering a SQL Server-like experience in a cloud. Microsoft controls many of the database configuration details, allowing the user to focus on the schema, data, and application layer.

Google AppEngine Datastore—Google’s NoSQL Datastore is integrated with their App Engine PaaS offering. Google states that Datastore is intended to provide robust, scalable.

Attributes for comparison:

Data Sizing

There has always been some limit of the size of the data set that any company can store on their systems. For example, Amazon RDS allows up to 1 TB/instance while SQL Azure allows up to 50 gigabytes

Data Integrity and Security

It has always been essential that proper security and data checks should be in place. Any cloud provider providing database as a service should acquire some prerequisites of background verification, appropriate certifications and accreditation and encryption and decryption methodologies.

Performance

Performance needs to be ensured so that it meets the user needs. This can be measured in terms of number of reads and writes on database.

Cost

The cost in terms of the usages of the service by the user which is always based on pay as u go service. For example – SimpleDB, the first 25 hours per month are free, and subsequent hours are $0.14 per unit hour.10 Data transfers inbound cost $0.10 per GB, and data transfers outbound range in cost from $0.15 per GB to $0.08 per GB, depending on usage; the first 1 GB per month is free.11 Monthly data storage costs are $0.25 per GB

Project plan

SWOT analysis

Strength

Weakness

Opportunity

Threat