Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Typically, the tool set will include services to support
• Collaboration and team working
• Data management—sometimes referred to as data as a service (DaaS)
• Authentication or identification—sometimes referred to as authenti-
cation as a service (AaaS)
• Performance monitoring and management
• Te st i ng
• Queue services
• E-mail and messaging
• User interface components
Often the supporting tools are configured as RESTful services, which can
readily be composed when building applications. It is important that devel-
opers are able to write applications without needing to know the details
of the underlying technology of the cloud to which they will be deployed.
Standard programming languages are often available, although normally
with some restrictions based on security and scalability concerns. Additional
support for programming and configuration tasks is often available from a
developer community specific to the PaaS offering.
16.2.1 Amazon Relational Database Service
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a PaaS that makes it
easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Similar
to the EC2 operating model, this service provides elastic capacities and at the
same time handles time-consuming database administration tasks. Thanks
to automated database backups and snapshots, the Amazon RDS is highly
reliable: a database instance can be recovered for any point in time or recov-
ery point that lies within the agreed retention period.
Amazon CloudWatch allows users to monitor the utilization of the com-
puting and storage capacities of their database instances and to scale the
available resources vertically using a simple API call as needed. In connec-
tion with highly demanding applications involving many read operations,
it is possible to scale out by launching the so-called Read Replica instances.
A corresponding high-availability offering allows the provisioning of syn-
chronously replicated database instances without additional costs in mul-
tiple availability regions as a safeguard against failures at a single location.
This way, it is possible to mask maintenance windows as RDS switches the
database services transparently between the locations.
Amazon RDS enables access to all MySQL database functions so that it
is a nobrainer to migrate existing applications while maintaining the pre-
ferred database tools and programming languages. If an existing application
already uses a MySQL database, the data can be exported with mysqldump
Search WWH ::
Custom Search