Voice of the DBA

Tag: Cloud Computing

  • Cloud First

    SQL Server 2016 is the first “cloud first” release of SQL Server, as told to us by Remus Rusanu, former Microsoft SQL Server development team member. The features and enhancements in SQL Server 2016 have been running in the Azure SQL Database cloud for some time before they will be packaged up and released as the on-premise SQL Server product that most of us expect to work with.

    There are a number of items about this worth discussing, but one stands out to me. The idea of using large numbers of feature flags and deploying code to the “cloud” for use by customers and internal Microsoft people is interesting. On one hand, it’s really just a faster way of having beta software examined by users other than developers, with no install/uninstall/upgrade for users. Speed is good, but being on the bleeding edge and having systems break isn’t necessarily what any of us want. However the use of these flags to turn features off quickly means that disruptions can be minimized for individual customers.

    Some of the engineering process changes made to be cloud first were important for Microsoft to have one main branch of code for SQL Server. Having a separate branch for the cloud and on-premise versions had to be inefficient and problematic. However, that’s not something we, as customers, care about. We just want the database platform to work, wherever we run may run it.

    I do think that having features come out in Azure, whether private testing, public preview, or general availability is good. The people that can test these features give feedback quickly, and the rest of us aren’t affected by the problem code. More importantly, the developers at Microsoft get the chance to learn more about how the features will be used and tune them before a very wide set of on-premise customers get code. Personally I was glad to see things like Row Level Security (RLS) appear in Azure first (Mar 2015), and come later to the on-premise version (SQL Server 2016).

    I really expect in the future that almost every feature that is added to the SQL Server platform will be run in some form in Azure before it’s released for on-premise use. In fact, I’d be surprised if features are added to the on-premise without 6-12 months of testing in the cloud. That’s good, and I hope it leads to an increase in code quality for those of us that will run SQL Server on our own hardware.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Two Days Off

    I almost couldn’t believe this when I saw the article. The Verizon Cloud is shutting down for 48 hours. Apparently they have maintenance scheduled for this weekend and notified their customers that their virtual machines will be shut down early Saturday morning. There are some legacy Verizon cloud-type services that will be available, but the platform they’ve been pushing to customers will be down.

    This isn’t good news for Verizon or their customers, but it also doesn’t help the cloud overall as a service. This outage reinforces the idea that reliability isn’t necessarily better for vendors than individuals. If costs for the cloud are anywhere near that of on-premise hosting, this event would certainly make me think twice about moving anything really important in my organization to a single cloud vendor.

    I suspect that most cloud vendors have outages like this, but they don’t shut down their entire clouds. When a large amount of maintenance is needed at a data center, most vendors would migrate customers to a separate data center or another part of their cloud while they perform their work. Either this mainenance is a major change to Verizon’s entire infrastructure that can’t be staged on just a part of their system, or they’ve poorly planned their architecture and maintenance.

    Either way, this weekend will certainly be a good DR test for enterprises that might have important applications hosted with Verizon. It will also be a chance to test how these clients notify their own customers of potential issues or how they respond to problems. I wouldn’t want to have an application hosted with Verizon as it would be a lot of work for me and likely a weekend away from family, but I know I’d learn a lot about how well I’ve prepared my own systems for fault tolerance.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

  • Load Balanced IIS Machines

    I noticed a contest this week while working on the Database Weekly newsletter. It’s the Cloud Hero contest, with the chance to win a Surface Pro 3. I could always use another device, or at least a device I could give away, so I decided to enter.

    There are a few things you can do, all of which are interesting to me in terms of a direction that I, and Red Gate, want to move. I don’t know if Azure works everywhere, but we are considering moving SQLServerCentral, or perhaps parts of it, to Azure, so this was a good chance for me to try out some new Azure stuff.

    I’ve messed with a few things in Azure, but mostly on the PaaS side. That interests me more, and I’ve done little with IaaS. I certainly haven’t really worked with IIS much in Azure. I decided to go through the VM setup, to create two IIS machines, load balanced on the same URL. I used this blog post with a cartoon and demo to run through the process.

    It was a bit more than 10 minutes, mostly because some of the allocation stuff in Azure took time, and the responsiveness from the VM in Azure was slow. From the time I connected to the time Server Manager popped up was over two minutes for each machine. Since I was going through some of the steps sequentially, that meant it was slow to get going.

    The video and the portal bring to light some of the issues of Azure. It’s a great tutorial and I was able to get the two machines load balancing IIS in 20 minutes (or less). It was surprised how quickly it went, but I also had to stop and think. The load balancing and cloud services are different now than they were when the post was written.

    I’m sure that’s the case with lots of Azure content. In some sense, this means that we will have lots of issues with people trying to learn how to use Azure as they’ll find content and information that is woefully out of date, sometimes quickly. I wonder if we need to think about having some code on blogs for Azure that marks the content as potentially out of date after it’s been out for 6 months.

    It’s a challenge to keep the content up to date, and luckily the changes weren’t too different in the portal.

    I am glad that I was able to get to IIS machines up and load balanced, delete them, and bring them back. That makes me think I may find some use for this Azure stuff, yet. I have a few projects in mind, including rebooting my personal site. Perhaps Azure will be the place I give it a go.

  • The Next Five Years

    On one hand, the next five years don’t seem too far away. Five years, that’s a year more than most of us spent in high school or college. On the the other hand, 5 years ago was a long time in the computer world. Azure first gave us the ability to create a database, as opposed to just a key value store. SQL Server 2008 was the current version of the platform. SQL Saturday #26 was held the first weekend in October in Redmond. 8GB was the large size for flash drives and the iPad hadn’t started the current tablet revolution.

    The world of data has grown dramatically in 5 years. Our cell phones and other devices are drastically changed the amount of data that is collected and consumed. Advances in bandwidth have almost removed the need for us to move all but the largest sizes of data without any physical media. If we look to the next five years, does anyone think they can accurately predict how much storage we’ll maintain in our pockets or how fast we’ll expect to move data on a daily basis?

    I ran across a prediction of surprising things in the next five years, and while I’m not sure I think they will all come true, I do think that similar things will come to pass because of two things: amazing increases in computational power available to any individual and tremendous amounts of data. That’s no great surprise, but I am excited. I can’t help but think that there will be so many opportunities for data professionals that most of us will be gainfully employed for decades.

    I do think, however, that the mundane, easy jobs of administering individual instances, checking logs and backups, and setting security will be few and far between. Unless you know how to do those things for thousands of instances at a time.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.