Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 9.2
Average time required to provision a
new database server in a typical large organization.
Because NoSQL servers can be deployed as a
managed service, a month-long period of time can
be dropped to a few minutes if not seconds to
change the number of nodes in a cluster.
figure shows a typical estimate of the steps Sally's information technology department
uses to provision a new database server.
As you can see by the Total Business Days calculation, it'll take 19 business days or
about a month to complete the project. This stands in sharp contrast to a cloud-based
NoSQL deployment that can add capacity in minutes or even seconds. The company
does have some virtual machine-based options, but there are no clear guarantees of
average response times for the virtual machine options.
Sally opts to use a cloud-based deployment for her NoSQL database for the first
year of the project. After the first year, the business unit will reevaluate the costs and
compare these with internal costs. This allows the team to quickly move forward with
their scale-out testing without incurring up-front capital expenditures associated with
ordering and configuring up to a dozen database servers.
Our goal in this chapter is not to compare local versus cloud-based deployment
methods. It's to understand how NoSQL architecture impacts a project's development
speed. But the choice to use a local or cloud-based deployment should be a consider-
ation in any project.
In chapter 1 we talked about how the business drives of volume, velocity, variability,
and agility were the drivers associated with the NoSQL movement. Now that you're
familiar with these drivers, you can look at your organization to see how NoSQL solu-
tions might positively impact these drivers to help your business meet the changing
demands of today's competitive marketplace.
9.2
Measuring agility
Understanding the overall agility of a project/team is the first step in determining the
agility associated with one or more database architectures. We'll now look at devel-
oper agility to see how it can be objectively measured.
Measuring pure agility in the NoSQL selection process is difficult since it's inter-
twined with developer training and tools. A person who's an expert with Java and
SQL
might create a new web application faster than someone who's a novice with a NoSQL
system. The key is to remove the tools and staff-dependent components from the mea-
surement process.
