How Software-Defined Storage Empowers Developers
To satisfy the desire for more streamlined development workflows and accelerated innovation, organizations are pushing control and ownership of the database infrastructure to the developers.
Databases are increasingly part of developers’ workflows as the backend data store for various web, enterprise and mobile applications.
The performance and reliability of the data platform, particularly the storage tier, are crucial for efficient development cycles. However, ensuring database reliability and performance can be a significant challenge for developers who lack expertise in data platform architecture.
Storage will affect how well your Oracle workloads run, their reliability and the associated costs to your business. Unfortunately, there is a high cost for poorly planned storage infrastructure: longer development cycles, disruptive rollbacks, poor application performance or failures, downtime, and financial losses for the business. All of this makes developers want to kick their database to the curb, which isn’t an option.
Thankfully, there’s an answer to choosing the proper storage architecture that can simplify provisioning, scaling and management for developers. This can be accomplished by building a data platform with software-defined storage as the foundation, allowing them to handle more database-related tasks themselves and regain control over their databases.
Traditional Testing Falls Short
Developers strive for continuous application performance and reliability, aiming for designs that perform optimally in production, scale effectively and allow for safe code deployments.
Traditional testing methods aim to ensure that the application code interacts correctly with the storage system, that data is appropriately handled and that the overall system performs reliably and efficiently. Despite these efforts, challenges persist, and problems often go undetected during testing.
This is because most tests prioritize the accuracy of data operations over performance, frequently falling short of uncovering underlying storage issues. Consequently, even if data is handled correctly, the solution may perform too slowly to meet production demands, leading to failures and decreased customer satisfaction.
Load testing, intended to address performance, introduces its own set of problems because the tests are complex, expensive and often conducted too late in the development process. By the time load testing reveals performance bottlenecks, it’s too late, and the cost to the business is significant, requiring costly and time-consuming rework.
Empowering Development with Simplified Infrastructure
Software-defined storage (SDS) empowers developers by providing them with greater control over their resources. The software can be installed on commodity hardware and run in private clouds on-premises to create a flexible and scalable storage system. Or it can be run on the public cloud. The flexibility of SDS simplifies the provisioning, management and scaling of storage resources.
Provisioning becomes easier because developers can allocate storage resources through software interfaces rather than dealing with complex hardware configurations. Management is streamlined with centralized control and monitoring of storage resources, often with automated tasks and policy-based management. Scaling is simplified and more efficient, enabling developers to easily add or remove storage capacity as needed, often without requiring significant hardware changes or downtime.
Developers thrive when they have control over development, deployment and troubleshooting. SDS provides developers with the capabilities to take ownership and accelerate development cycles. Developers can focus on innovation rather than being burdened by infrastructure considerations.
The Benefits of Oracle on AWS
Cloud storage offers a level of flexibility and accessibility that on-premises storage can’t match. IO-intensive database workloads, like Oracle, are well-suited to migrate to the public cloud, given the massive storage capacities and compute capabilities available there.
But while Oracle’s requirements for compute and memory are easily met on AWS, the performance requirements for Tier 1 and 2 applications using Oracle are a challenge.
These challenges are not specific to Oracle databases in their fundamental nature, but they can be particularly problematic for Oracle workloads due to several factors. While the cloud offers massive scale and flexibility, the specific performance requirements for Oracle databases, especially for mission-critical and highly transactional applications, are engineered to exploit very low-latency, high-throughput and predictable I/O environments.
The virtualization and shared nature of cloud infrastructure, while beneficial for many applications, can introduce performance variability and latency that directly affect Oracle’s demanding I/O profile. Oracle uses various features like Automatic Storage Management (ASM), Real Application Clusters (RAC) and large block sizes, all of which are designed to optimize I/O on high-performance local storage.
On-premises, this is achieved through highly optimized storage area networks (SANs) and DAS architectures with high-performance NVMe drives. Replicating this exact level of performance and deterministic I/O behavior in a highly virtualized, multitenant cloud environment can be difficult.
Thankfully, there are SDS options available in the AWS Marketplace that offer the solution.
Performance comparison of native cloud storage versus Lightbits on AWS using 3 x i4i.metal instances running the SLOB (Silly Little Oracle Benchmark). Higher IOPS is better. (Source: Lightbits Labs)
A New Approach to Database Infrastructure
Traditional storage solutions often present developers with limitations in complexity, performance and reliability, which can significantly impact a business. SDS offers a new paradigm that enhances the entire software development life cycle from testing to production.
SDS helps to automate and optimize infrastructure management, allowing developers to concentrate on application development and database design and not storage infrastructure. This leads to increased efficiency, faster time to market and more reliable database deployments.
Whether you deploy SDS on-premises in a private cloud or on the public cloud, developers can ensure optimal performance and reliability of their database workloads and drive business growth.
If you are interested in learning more about software-defined storage for Oracle to simplify developer application life cycles, download our whitepaper: “Running Oracle with Software-Defined Storage.”
