Joint blog written by Vijay Ramachandran, VP Product Management, VMware and Gurmeet (GG) Goindi, Director of Product Management, Google Cloud.
Introduction
VMware and Google Cloud have announced an expanded partnership where Google Cloud’s AlloyDB Omni database is available on VMware Cloud Foundation. This tech preview brings together the robust capabilities of AlloyDB Omni and VMware’s Data Services Manager, providing you with a powerful solution to simplify PostgreSQL management, modernize your existing databases, and supercharge your journey into generative AI applications.
Let’s delve into the core aspects of this tech preview, see how it’s poised to simplify database management on the vSphere platform, and explain how to get started.
Data is at the Heart of Digital Transformation
At the foundation of digital transformation lies data. Modern applications, especially those that include AI capabilities, rely on a myriad of data components, including databases, messaging and streaming applications, key-value stores, object storage, and more. Ownership of this data is often spread across multiple teams, including infrastructure, application development, and data teams.
Even in organizations with good processes, developers need to raise tickets for the simplest tasks such as creating a development or test database. An infrastructure administrator then needs to carve out the necessary resources, the application or data team is responsible for provisioning the data application, and a database administrator is responsible for tasks such as upgrades/patching, monitoring performance and availability, backup and recovery.
The ticket-based approach is not scalable anymore to sustain the rising demand of data services by developers.
Introducing the new release of VMware Data Services Manager
Data Services Manager bridges this gap and streamlines the entire data service lifecycle. It allows infrastructure administrators to allocate resources and establish policies for data teams directly in the vSphere client, while allowing the data teams to retain full control of defining the database policies.
Infrastructure policies include components for compute, storage and networking:
- Compute policies specify target vSphere clusters and resource pools for data service provisioning, while VM classes capture predetermined CPU and memory sizes..
- Storage policies specify capacity, placement, and data configurations to meet different performance and availability SLOs, as well as properties for data compression, deduplication, and encryption.
- Networking policies facilitate the allocation of port groups for database networks over virtual switches and the assignment of IP pools for data and management interfaces..
With the Infrastructure policies set, infrastructure administrators can hand over control to the data teams, allowing them to define database-level knobs such as approved database versions, templates, backup policies, and encryption. Data teams retain the ability to perform upgrades and patching.
For end users, whether developers or members of the data team, the provisioning of databases becomes a straightforward process. Data Services Manager seamlessly integrates with Aria Automation, offering a self-service interface. It exposes Data Services Manager-managed DB templates in the Aria Automation Service Catalog, seamlessly integrates with Aria’s tenancy model, and supports application blueprints. This enables real-time deployment of Data Services Manager-managed databases as standalone requests or as part of complex application deployments, such as 3-tier web applications. Day 2 operations, such as auto-backup, changing DB ownership, and scaling up, are easily managed through Data Services Manager.
In summary, Data Services Manager automates the complete lifecycle of a data application, from infrastructure management to application provisioning. This automation eliminates the need for ticketing systems, resulting in simpler tasks for data teams, on-demand consumption of databases for developers, and faster innovation.
Opening Data Services Manager to Ecosystem Partners
VMware’s vision is to open up Data Services Manager to ecosystem partners. This means allowing database and other data vendors to seamlessly integrate into Data Services Manager. This means IT organizations can manage the data estate and offer the best-in-class data services to developers and other users, with tools that are a native extension of vSphere and integrated with Aria Automation. Developers would then be able to provision and consume a wide range of data services in an easy, programmatic way..
Partnership with Google Cloud with AlloyDB Omni
As an exciting milestone, Google’s AlloyDB Omni is the first database to partner with Data Services Manager. This partnership empowers developers to provision and manage AlloyDB Omni efficiently on the vSphere platform using Data Services Manager. Moreover, running AlloyDB Omni on VMware vSAN brings additional benefits such as rapid provisioning, instantaneous replicas and data protection.AlloyDB Omni, Google’s PostgreSQL-compatible database, provides a powerful option for VMware customers to modernize their most demanding enterprise database workloads. AlloyDB Omni includes all of the core database engine innovations of the fully-managed AlloyDB service including improved transactional performance compared to standard PostgreSQL, accelerated analytical processing including automatic data columnarization in memory, automatic vacuum and memory management, and an index advisor that helps optimize frequently run queries.
In Google Cloud’s performance tests, AlloyDB Omni provides more than 2x the transactional performance and up to 100x the analytical performance of standard PostgreSQL. AlloyDB Omni also includes the AlloyDB columnar engine, which keeps frequently queried data in an in-memory columnar format for faster scans, joins, and aggregations. AlloyDB Omni uses machine learning to automatically organize your data between row-based and columnar formats, convert the data when needed, and choose between columnar and row-based execution plans. This delivers excellent performance for a wide range of queries, with minimal management overhead.
An integral part of AlloyDB is AlloyDB AI, a set of capabilities built into AlloyDB to help you build performant and scalable gen AI applications using your operational data. AlloyDB AI helps developers more easily and efficiently combine the power of large language models (LLMs) with real-time operational data by helping you generate vector embeddings from within your database, access data stored in open-source gen AI tools, and access Google’s state of the art AI models in Vertex AI. AlloyDB AI runs vector queries up to 10 times faster than standard PostgreSQL, and integrations with the open source AI ecosystem provide an end-to-end solution for building gen AI applications.
Conclusion
The expanded partnership between VMware and Google Cloud marks a significant milestone in simplifying database management and driving innovation in the realm of data applications. Data Services Manager, with its automation and integration capabilities, promises to redefine the way we handle data, ultimately contributing to more efficient and productive development processes. With AlloyDB Omni, this collaboration holds great promise for businesses aiming to modernize their databases and applications and build transformative generative AI applications..You can apply for the Early Access Program by completing this form.
