[cs615asa] HW #N

Dane Pilcher dpilcher at stevens.edu
Mon May 4 15:18:59 EDT 2015


Hello everyone,


On April 28 I attended a meet up on “Architecting for the Cloud: Avoiding
Database Disaster.” The speaker, Seth Proctor the Chief Technology Officer
at NuoDB, discussed the current shortcoming of cloud architecture and their
impacts relating to databases. He illustrated certain needs for the cloud
and how these needs are being met currently and how they should be met in
the future. He explained that a cloud system must have on-demand capacity.
This means scaling horizontally on-demand which introduces a certain
problem of splitting the database across multiple machines. He referred to
this as sharding, data is split and independent in different locations. By
doing this, it changes the application logic because some data is one place
while other data is a completely different place. Most current systems are
attempting to fix this by removing consistency across different machines.
This fixes the problem of finding the data, but is a tradeoff because all
the data may not be up-to-date. He suggests building abstractions on top of
a distributed system for simplicity and ease of use. Without abstractions,
any change to the architecture or to the software will require a great
amount of interactions between developers and the system administrators.
Building abstractions on top of the distributed databases would allow both
parties to work more indecently, saving time and money.


Cloud Requirements


   - Scale on-demand
   - Continuous availability
   - Simplify interaction between application and administration through
   abstraction
   - Hybrid system – running in multiple environments and locations
   - Database as a service

 The take away from this as system administrators is that databases are
difficult to scale. They need to be scaled horizontally on-demand. Because
of this system administrators need to create layers of abstractions so
that  it doesn’t matter where the data is to the application.



Video of presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDxBl-15iyE



Dane Pilcher
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.stevens.edu/mailman/private/cs615asa/attachments/20150504/d949ac7b/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the cs615asa mailing list