Percona Live 2014 is a conference that might not have all of the flashy marketing and promotions, but its importance to the developer community cannot go unnoticed. At the event #theCUBE welcomes Sam Anderson, Product Marketing Manager for Cloud Big Data Solutions at Rackspace, and Daniel Morris, Manager of Database Products at Rackspace. Anderson and Morris joined #theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Jeffrey Kelly to discuss cloud as an engine to innovation.

Cloud is the engine to innovation

 
Data lives in the cloud natively, explains Anderson, whether social data or machine data. Therefore, the explosion of cloud computing is directly related to people realizing that data can live and act in the cloud natively. MySQL is a conduit for transitioning workloads to the cloud, as data technologies can process the data in the cloud.

Anderson summarizes cloud innovation as such:

“People are saying, ‘As long as it is landing on the cloud, why ingest that internally? Can we process it on the cloud? Can we utilize different data technologies to… process it where it lives?’

“That’s really put the onus on us to create kind of a portfolio of data services that… addresses that… the onus is on us to be experts and specialists in MySQL and help people to transition those workloads to the cloud.”

 
In the same fashion as SkySQL’s Roger Levy, the Rackspace guys compare the success of MySQL to MongoDB’s successful journey. A key cog in the wheel of MySQL’s success is the ability to have multiple forks within its ecosystem. MariaDB, Percona, Consortium, and WebscaleSQL — all are different forks of MySQL that contribute to a common mission and goal of advancing MySQL.

“It’s not only a world where MySQL exists by itself,” says Morris. “More and more, talking to customers, they are not just running MySQL, there is a new stack emerging.”

Tsunami of data

 
With the tsunami of data that is happening thanks to machine-to-machine communication within the Internet of Things movement, understanding how companies like Google and Facebook transition and scale data further proves the importance of the cloud. Companies are exploring new technologies, and SiliconANGLE is noticing a trend that bigger enterprises are the ones actually struggling the most. With enterprises, it’s not just a single switch on the back end. Legacy systems are a headache to transition to the cloud.

So does that mean the cloud is something of an outsource model? Where is the control point and can the enterprise maintain control?

Rackspace believes it’s uniquely positioned because it has multiple models it can offer. In listening to Anderson and Morris, an important takeaway would be that the model for cloud success is not a single source of truth. Our research at SiliconANGLE and Wikibon supports this notion. Multiple offerings will win: dedicated, private, and public clouds. Morris details how Rackspace even has a model for customers that want DIY cloud solutions. They key for Rackspace is to offer a host of options to lower the barrier to entry.

Anderson speaks of how there is still a lot of “toe dipping” by enterprises who are not ready to fully commit to the cloud. Furrier pushes the Rackspace guys to see if they thought that cloud adoption was “slowing down,” but Anderson and Morris are steadfast in their stance that it is actually picking up in some areas. An interesting point Anderson makes is that the roadmap becomes increasingly more important. Where are enterprises taking their infrastructure because data is very hard to move? Data is extremely sticky, and an enterprise wants complete confidence in its cloud providers’ portfolio.

Cloud choices

 
The days of having three database vendors to pick from and building your application around them are over. People are developing around open source, with more choices than ever in the database market. To compound the new challenges to this market shift, customers are choosing multiple technologies, too.  Application developers are wanting to do less and less with scaling the database and managing the database of their workloads. In essence, they want the open source technologies to “work better” and “work smarter”. Rackspace sees this as a very unique opportunity to position its products and services: How can we enable our customers to run these more complicated workloads?

Rackspace is attacking this new opportunity by creating a portfolio of data services. It is taking an assertive effort to ramp up the capabilities around data. Anderson gives a few examples to showcase Rackspace’s commitment:

• Partnered with Hortonworks to bring Hadoop cloud offering based on open standards with Pure Vanilla Hortonworks data platform
• Acquisition of Object Rocket – a perforate way to deploy MongoDB
• Acquisition of Exceptional Cloud Services – does Redis to go

______-as-a-Service

 
Automation in the cloud, orchestration in the cloud, and infrastructure in the cloud — these three worlds are colliding. Which means that with software, orchestration, database, and infrastructure, a slew of ‘-as-a-service’ opportunities in the cloud are emerging.

• Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure-as-a-Service is one market that Rackspace feels very comfortable in, says Anderson.

“In today’s world, you have to start reaching in those application layers to really add value. Infrastructure is now a commodity like oil, to where people can consume it in kind of a brokerage model. Rackspace really has to try to understand what are the things limiting that adoption? What are the things that are inhibiting companies from moving to the type of technologies that they really want to consume? I think that is where Platform as a Service becomes increasingly more popular. And that’s a new place for Rackspace,”  Anderson explains.

• Platform as a Service

Is OpenStack fragile or agile? Will a single platform emerge?

“I wouldn’t use fragile to describe it, I think I’d put it more on the agile side,” says Morris. “I do think that OpenStack is evolving. It started out as a pure infrastructure play. …The mission and the model of OpenStack has evolved rapidly, that’s why I give it that sort of agile stamp. Their moving with the community and all of the different players, IBM’s in this, Rackspace’s in this, HP, they’re all in there shaping its direction. Its going form pure infrastructure to having database services, to having platform-based services, to having orchestration services, you’re seeing all of these layers get built out,” Morris notes.

OpenStack + open source

 
To Morris, “open” is more than just open source. One point he makes is that open should mean being able to bring your workload to a service provider and not be locked-in to that provider. Rackspace’s OpenStack supports this concept, and Morris is seeing some very complicated workloads get run on OpenStack. But can OpenStack survive, or is it slowing down to die, asks Furrier?

Anderson and Morris believe that people are asking real and challenging questions, beyond the high level theories of what OpenStack can do. That is why they believe OpenStack isn’t slowing down. That is why they believe OpenStack has legs, and that open source will win. People are running open source, scaling it, and constant improvements are being committed back into its community.

Rackspace sees a lot of overlap between the MySQL and OpenStack communities, too.

“OpenStack is using MySQL on the backend to host most of the infrastructure databases to scale out Nova, Trove, so there is a lot of overlap,” says Morris. That amount of overlap only confirms that OpenStack is not losing steam or slowing down, and we’re still at a point where people are going to the cloud — with private cloud really picking up OpenStack, according to Morris.