Today at Microsoft’s //build conference Microsoft announced a couple of new data platform services that are available for people who are looking to run MySQL driven applications using Microsoft’s cloud in a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. This solution gives you the same flexibility and ease of management of the other PaaS data platform solutions that Microsoft has made available in their offering, but now with a fully Open Source platform.
In addition to the MySQL platform they also announced PostgreSQL as an open source offering in their PaaS offering. While the PostgreSQL announcement is just as huge, I’m focusing on the MySQL announcement as that’s the part of the platform that I’ve been working with as it hosts WordPress.
Why?
Why would Microsoft be putting these open source offerings? Because they’ve been on the roadmap for quite some time. Remember that a large portion of Azure is running open source software and platforms for customers. But moving those open source platforms into a PaaS offering is quite a bit harder than just standing up a couple of VMs and calling it a PaaS platform. There’s a massive amount of tooling and automation that has to happen on the back end to configure all this, plus setup the portal to handle management, as well as the integration with all the other components in Azure (OMS, firewall, monitoring, alert rules, etc.)
Now I know that some people are going to drone on and on about how this is just Microsoft reacting to Google’s announcement back in March. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. Microsoft has been working on this service for months and it’s been in Private Preview since long before Google’s announcement. I know this because several of our websites have been using this service as the database backend for months now.
What you get when you spin up a MySQL (or PostgreSQL) database in this new PaaS service is a MySQL instance with HA built into the platform. You just connect to it like you would any other MySQL service by using the MySQL command line tools (or any of the web based management tools) and you create databases and point your applications at them.
Is it complete?
My assumption (and hope) is that the goal for these open source PaaS Data Platform services is parity with the SQL Server based solutions. So as this platform gets closer and closer to GA we’ll hopefully see this service getting closer and closer to the parity in features between the SQL Server based data platform solution and the MySQL based solution. Personally I can’t wait for multi-site configurations to be available to we can stretch a MySQL database across multiple sites, then I’ll have to come up with a plugin that’ll redirect read only queries to another database server in a MySQL configuration which’ll be kind of cool to work on.
This sure is an exciting time to be working in Data Platform especially in Azure as Microsoft brings us more Open Source Software into the Azure stack.
Using MySQL in PaaS
DCAC has been using this MySQL in PaaS solution for quite a while now, since probably sometime in January to run several of our sites, including the development version of our main website where we do some WordPress plugin development. We put the dev site there because when doing development and testing of WordPress plugins you end up generating a lot of controlled workload for a server so you can see everything that’s coming up and being a problem. And frankly it’s been pretty easy to forget that this is a private preview service.
The response time for an OLTP application (which was what we were testing) was really good. The database queries were a few milliseconds longer than when the MySQL database was running locally, and that’s all because of the network difference between talking to a VM in the same subnet and talking to a service in the same region, but that’s understandable and acceptable. Going across regions introduces the expected level of network latency that you’d get going across the network from one city to another. As this service is lit up in more regions this problem will become less and less as you’ll be able to have MySQL databases in the same region as your web servers.
All in all we’ve been very happy with the service as we’ve been using it against development and customer facing websites over the last several months. And we’re really looking forward to see what Microsoft gives us with the product in the coming weeks and months so that we can eventually move all our sites to it and stop managing VMs in Azure.
Denny
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