Are you looking for a proven and efficient way to implement a highly available hybrid-cloud solution for your mission-critical applications? AWS’s Outposts are a great option for building a hybrid-cloud environment, but you still need a way to make your applications highly available. Veritas InfoScale provides high availability for your applications, and it integrates with AWS Outposts to enable you to easily host your mission-critical workloads in a hybrid-cloud environment with minimal complexity.
InfoScale is a software-defined optimization solution for mission-critical applications that minimizes the risk of application downtime and data loss to help keep your mission-critical applications up and running all the time. InfoScale also gives you the flexibility to run your applications on nearly any physical, virtual, or cloud platform.
InfoScale integrates seamlessly with AWS Outposts, which allows you to easily host your mission-critical workloads using a hybrid-cloud architecture with the familiar user experience and functionality you get with AWS. InfoScale provides:
- Business continuity – complete high availability and resiliency automation for your applications, with a very similar user experience both on-premises and in AWS – including Outposts. Your applications can be made highly available across AWS availability zones and regions – minimizing the likelihood of downtime in the event of a local or regional outage
- Storage management – InfoScale can intelligently manage EBS volumes to ensure that your data is highly available in an application cluster. With InfoScale’s Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) feature, you can provide shared storage on AWS Outposts with performance and data resiliency suitable for enterprise applications.
- Service level management – InfoScale’s Virtual Business Service (VBS) feature is aware of the complete business service provided by multi-tiered applications. VBS manages high availability for all the application tiers as a single logical service. This means faster recovery and minimal downtime – with no manual intervention. Figure 1 will give you an idea of what this might look like in an AWS Outpost.
How InfoScale works on AWS Outposts
AWS Outposts provide an on-premises platform as a service (PaaS) with integrated compute (EC2), networking, and storage. InfoScale uses the AWS Outpost infrastructure and services and presents them as a cluster of pooled resources like what you see in Figure 2. This means you can run your applications in an active/passive mode or an active/active mode – providing maximum application availability.
InfoScale uses AWS EBS storage and creates a shared pool. If your applications need more compute resources, you can add compute resources dynamically to the cluster. If your applications need more storage, then storage resources can be dynamically added to the cluster. InfoScale enables your compute and storage resources to scale independently, which optimizes resource utilization and helps reduce your cloud infrastructure costs. It also gives you the flexibility to use only the infrastructure you need to maximize your application performance and uptime.
InfoScale has advanced functionality and agents explicitly designed to work with AWS that enable HA and DR capabilities for your applications:
- AWSIP – manages and monitors the networking resources in AWS
- AWSRoute53 – updates and monitors the mapping between hostnames and IP addresses. This InfoScale agent does the mapping for the Amazon Route 53 domain when failing over nodes across subnets
- Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) – enables local storage from EBS volumes attached to the EC2 instances to be shared within the cluster over the network using InfoScale’s Low Latency Transport (LLT) protocol
Using InfoScale with a MySQL database on AWS Outposts
Now that we know more about how InfoScale works with Outposts, let’s look at how you can use InfoScale to implement a highly available MySQL database in an Outpost. In this example, we’ll look at a single instance MySQL database that’s made highly available across two EC2 instances within an Availability Zone. Here’s the process for setting it up:
- The AWS Outpost is set up in a single Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). In this example, we’re using 3 private subnets and we have two EC2 instances. InfoScale is installed on both EC2 instances and will form a cluster using the FSS feature to manage the EBS volumes used for the MySQL data. Cluster communication between the EC2 instances is managed by InfoScale using the integrated LLT protocol.
- A single instance of MySQL is installed and set up on both EC2 instances. MySQL is installed on EBS volumes managed by InfoScale’s volume manager (VxVM) with FSS enabled and formatted with an InfoScale file system (VxFS).
- The MySQL database and datafiles are online and mounted on 1 of the EC2 instances, which is the primary active instance. The second EC2 instance is the passive instance.
- InfoScale AWSIP and MySQL agents are installed on each node and used to manage the active/passive MySQL cluster. InfoScale provides automated high availability between the MySQL instances, which includes mounting the file system shared between the nodes with FSS on the active instance.
Now, you have a highly available MySQL database running on InfoScale in an Outpost! Do you need an active/active configuration? No problem – this can be set up very quickly and easily with FSS! More information can be found in this paper. You can also add geographical redundancy with InfoScale’s Global Cluster Option and Veritas Volume Replicator to manage failover and data replication between Availability Zones and Regions.
Summary
AWS Outposts in conjunction with InfoScale's industry-leading data management and availability technology provides a strong foundation to run your mission-critical applications in a hybrid-cloud setup while meeting your high availability and performance requirements. InfoScale’s software-defined storage management and high-availability agents for AWS are custom designed to provide maximum uptime and flexibility for applications running in AWS Outposts, making it the ideal foundation for running your mission-critical applications in AWS with maximum uptime and performance.
Please check out the InfoScale technical library for more information on InfoScale.
