My father always used the expression, “sometimes the juice ain’t worth the squeeze”. What he meant by it was, “what you put into something better be worth what you get out of it”. Why do I bring this up? Well…we’ve got this GREAT feature for Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) we’ve been banging away on: PMM DBaaS (Database as a Service). Using it for only 30 minutes, you can see it has the potential to change the way teams think about providing database services while controlling cost and minimizing complexity. But it’s a major pain in the ass to get all set up to first realize that value…and we want to change that!
TLDR: YES! I’ve been wanting to try out DBaaS, but have no desire to become a Kubernetes expert just to see it! Skip to the good stuff!
Quick history. Our DBaaS (Database as a Service) offering is designed to be resilient and performant…after all, we’re kind of known for being able to beat databases into high-performance submission. So when considering the backends to help us deliver performance, scalability, reliability, and more, we settled on Kubernetes as the starting point thanks to its scalability, resiliency, and orchestration capabilities out of the box! We released a preview release about a year ago and have been adding features and functionality to it ever since.
Getting Past Setup Kubernetes
I’m lucky enough to get to talk to all kinds of users that are begging for a solution with the flexibility of your public cloud DBaaS but without racking up tens of thousands of dollars of bills a month, or that need to maintain tight control of their data, or who have moved a ton of workload to the cloud and have racks of servers just sitting there. I tell them about what we’ve built and encourage them to try it out. All of them get excited to hear what it can do and are eager to give it a try! So I give them some time and follow up a few weeks later…nothing. I encourage them to make the time, follow up a few weeks later…nothing? Challenge them as to why not when they admit they’re losing precious cycles on silly operations that users should just be able to do on their own and the number one response is “Kubernetes is too confusing for me and I could never get past Step 1: Setup Kubernetes”. Not. Good!
I’ve used our DBaaS on numerous occasions…mostly just on my laptop with minikube. There’s a drawback with minikube; you must have a powerhouse of a machine to be able to use DBaaS and PMM on the same machine to play around with it; not to mention weights and chains to keep your laptop from flying away when the fans go nuts! The best way to poke around DBaaS is with some cheap public cloud infrastructure! So I figured I’d give it a try…our docs show what looks like “three easy steps”, but failed to mention the prerequisite 20 steps if you don’t already have eksctl and other tools installed/configured ??♂️. It was more work than I budgeted time for, but I decided to push through; determined to get an EKS cluster up and running! I threw in the towel after about five hours one Saturday…defeated. It wasn’t just getting the cluster up, it was all the hoops and tricks and rules and roles and permissions needed to do anything with that cluster. That’s five hours of squeeze and still no juice!
So I did what all smart engineers do…found a smarter engineer! Sergey and I decided there was a real opportunity to make DBaaS available to a wider range of users…those who were not AWS Level 8 Samurais with PhDs in Kubernetes and the goal was simple: “Be able to use PMM’s DBaaS in 10 minutes or less…starting from nothing!” We have not quite hit the 10-minute mark, but we DID hit the 18-minute mark…and 16 of those 18 minutes are spent watching paint dry as the tiny robots of CloudFormation get you a suitable cluster up and running. But when it’s done, there’s no messing with IAM roles or Load Balancers or VPCs…just copy/paste, and use!
Wanna Try DBaaS?
You’re going to need your AWS Access Key ID and your AWS Secret Access Key for a root user…so get that before you start the timer 😉 (here is a handy guide to getting them if you don’t already have them safely stored somewhere). You will also need a Linux system to set up your PMM server on and make the needed calls to get your K8s cluster up and running (this has only been tested on CentOS and Ubuntu).
As any user with sudo, run:
1 | curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shoffman-percona/easyK8s/main/easyK8s-aws.sh | bash -s -- <AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID> <AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY> |
You can optionally add an AWS region at the end of that if you want something other than us-east-2 (default).
While this is running (~16 min) you can go right to the PMM installation. In a new tab/terminal window and run the following (user with sudo privileges):
1 | curl -fsSL https://www.percona.com/get/pmm | /bin/bash |
When the script is done, the CLI tool will print a list of IP-based URLs you can put in a browser to access the PMM UI. Copy/paste one into your favorite browser. You may receive a security warning, there are instructions in the script output on how to bypass if you don’t get a “proceed anyway” option in your browser.
Log in to PMM’s UI, the default username/password is admin/admin and you’ll be prompted to change the password.
To turn on DBaaS you’ll need to click the gear icon 
, followed by “Settings”. On the PMM settings page, click on “Advanced Settings” and scroll down to the “Technical Preview features” section, and toggle DBaaS on. While you’re here, fill in the Public Address using the “Get from Browser” button. This makes automatic monitoring that much easier later. Click “Apply Changes” and you’ll see the screen refresh and a new icon will appear of a database 
. Click it to get to the DBaaS main page…but you’ll most likely be holding here as the infrastructure is probably still setting up. Take advantage of the opportunity to stand up, stretch your leg, maybe grab a drink!
Once the cluster setup is completed, you can Copy/Paste from the ####BEGIN KUBECONFIG#### comment to the ####END KUBECONFIG#### comment. Switch over to the PMM DBaaS UI on the Kubernetes Cluster tab click “Register New Kubernetes Cluster”. Name your new cluster and paste the config in the bottom window…it’ll take a second and your PMM server will install both Percona XtraDB Cluster and Percona Server for MongoDB operators and enable the DB Cluster tab where you can create and size DBs of your choosing!
That’s it! If all the complicated setup has held you back from taking DBaaS for a test drive, hopefully this will give you “more juice for your squeeze”! We’d love to hear feedback on what we’ve built for so far so feel free to leave a comment here or offer an improvement in our jira instance under the PMM project. Our main objective is to take the complication out of getting a database up and running for your application development process and being able to create MySQL and MongoDB databases in one place (PostgreSQL coming soon). When you’re done playing, you can unregister the Kubernetes from PMM then log in to your AWS account, and delete both stacks (eksctl-pmmDBaaS-nodes-XXX and eksctl-pmmDBaaS-cluster) in the Cloudformation app for the region you chose (or us-east-2 if you left the default).
