OpenStack Trove Day
I just returned from a week in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I was attending the OpenStack Trove Day and the Trove mid-cycle meetup, both sponsored by the great folks at Tesora.
I am relatively new to the OpenStack and Trove arenas so this was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn more about the communities, the various components within OpenStack, and what part Trove plays. I found the entire event very worthwhile – I met a lot of key people in the community, learned more about Trove and its potential, and in general felt a great energy and excitement surrounding Trove and OpenStack as a whole.
There were more than 120 attendees at Trove Day. That is almost four times the initial estimate! I think I would call that a success. There were 7 very high quality topics that covered material ranging from new and coming features within Trove, to deep inspection of how it is currently used in several big name companies to an investor’s perspective of the OpenStack market. There were also 2 panel style discussions that covered a lot of ground with all participants being ‘guys on the ground’ actively working with OpenStack deployments including one of my fellow Perconians, Mr. Tim Sharp.
One of the main takeaways for me from the entire day was the forward looking adoption estimates for Trove. This came up over and over through the various talks and panels. There seems to be a tremendous amount of interest in Trove deployments for late 2014/2015 but very few actual live users today. There also seems to be a bit of a messaging issue and confusion amongst potential users as to what Trove really is and is not. Simply reading the Trove Mission Statement should quickly clarify:
The OpenStack Open Source Database as a Service Mission: To provide scalable and reliable Cloud Database as a Service provisioning functionality for both relational and non-relational database engines, and to continue to improve its fully-featured and extensible open source framework.
So allow me to expand on that a bit based on some specific comments or questions that I overheard:
- Trove is NOT a database abstraction layer nor any sort of database unification tool; all applications still communicate with their respective datastores directly through their native APIs.
- Trove is NOT a database monitoring, management or analysis tool; all of your favorite debugging and monitoring tools like Percona Toolkit will still work exactly as advertised, and yes, you do need a monitoring tool.
- Although Trove does have some useful backup scheduling options, Trove is NOT a complete backup and recovery tool that can accommodate every backup strategy; you may still use 3rd party options such as scripting your own around Percona XtraBackup or make your life a lot easier and sign up for the Percona Backup Service.
- Trove IS a very nice way to add resource provisioning for many disparate datastores and has some ‘smarts’ built in for each. This ensures a common user experience when provisioning and managing datastore instances.
To that final point, our friends at Tesora introduced their new Database Certification Program at Trove Day. This new program will ensure a high level of compatibility between the various participating database vendors and the Trove project. Of course, Percona Server has already been certified.
I see the future of Trove as being very bright with a huge potential for expansion into other areas, once it is stabilized. I am very excited to begin contributing to this project and watch it grow.
Until next time…
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