Patent Application
20200233719
This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the present disclosure, which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present disclosure. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
Organizations, regardless of size, rely upon access to information technology (IT) and data and services for their continued operation and success. A respective organization's IT infrastructure may have associated hardware resources (e.g. computing devices, load balancers, firewalls, switches, etc.) and software resources (e.g. productivity software, database applications, custom applications, and so forth). Over time, more and more organizations have turned to cloud computing approaches to supplement or enhance their IT infrastructure solutions.
Cloud computing relates to the sharing of computing resources that are generally accessed via the Internet. In particular, a cloud computing infrastructure allows users, such as individuals and/or enterprises, to access a shared pool of computing resources, such as servers, storage devices, networks, applications, and/or other computing based services. By doing so, users are able to access computing resources on demand that are located at remote locations, which resources may be used to perform a variety of computing functions (e.g., storing and/or processing large quantities of computing data). For enterprise and other organization users, cloud computing provides flexibility in accessing cloud computing resources without accruing large up-front costs, such as purchasing expensive network equipment or investing large amounts of time in establishing a private network infrastructure. Instead, by utilizing cloud computing resources, users are able redirect their resources to focus on their enterprise's core functions.
One consequence of the growing prevalence of cloud computing solutions is the need to facilitate both client-driven and infrastructure-driven changes or updates to the cloud-environment as client needs changes and/or as capacity or bandwidth limitations are reached. Such infrastructure or client-driven changes may be difficult to implement in practice in a complex infrastructure.
A summary of certain embodiments disclosed herein is set forth below. It should be understood that these aspects are presented merely to provide the reader with a brief summary of these certain embodiments and that these aspects are not intended to limit the scope of this disclosure. Indeed, this disclosure may encompass a variety of aspects that may not be set forth below.
In one aspect, the present approach provides functionality to allow a customer to rename a client instance utilized by the customer without having to provision a new instance. In such an implementation, data may be kept or maintained within the renamed instance. In one such approach, new nodes having the new name are added to an existing instance. The existing database is backed up and new nodes are added to the pool under the original name. The existing database, database catalog, and tables are renamed to the new name. A new domain name system (DNS) entry is configured and, if needed, a new e-mail account is set up under the new name. System properties may also be updated to reflect the new name. Lastly, a job may be scheduled and run to remove or archive the original nodes and DNS. As may be appreciated, such an approach may be useful in the context of name change of an entity or organization that utilizes the instance.
While the preceding is a change that may be performed based on a customer need, in addition it may be desirable in some circumstances to perform changes or updates based on an infrastructure-based need. For example, in some circumstances virtual IP (VIP) addresses may be employed as part of a cloud implementation. Based on load or other considerations it may be useful to migrate the VIP addresses and the instances using the VIP addresses in parallel. For example, such a migration may be justified based on load or load balancing considerations.
In accordance with aspects of the approach, multiple VIPs and the instances using the VIPs may be migrated at one time and without downtime to the customer. Further, in accordance with this approach, each VIP migration is independent and does not impact other customers not involved in the migration. Further, for all instances using the same VIP, if a migration step is failed, changes to instances, pools, and pool members using the VIP may be automatically rolled back. The following disclosure relates aspects of these approaches in greater detail.
Various refinements of the features noted above may exist in relation to various aspects of the present disclosure. Further features may also be incorporated in these various aspects as well. These refinements and additional features may exist individually or in any combination. For instance, various features discussed below in relation to one or more of the illustrated embodiments may be incorporated into any of the above-described aspects of the present disclosure alone or in any combination. The brief summary presented above is intended only to familiarize the reader with certain aspects and contexts of embodiments of the present disclosure without limitation to the claimed subject matter.
Various aspects of this disclosure may be better understood upon reading the following detailed description and upon reference to the drawings in which:
One or more specific embodiments will be described below. In an effort to provide a concise description of these embodiments, not all features of an actual implementation are described in the specification. It should be appreciated that in the development of any such actual implementation, as in any engineering or design project, numerous implementation-specific decisions must be made to achieve the developers' specific goals, such as compliance with system-related and enterprise-related constraints, which may vary from one implementation to another. Moreover, it should be appreciated that such a development effort might be complex and time consuming, but would nevertheless be a routine undertaking of design, fabrication, and manufacture for those of ordinary skill having the benefit of this disclosure.
As used herein, the term “computing system” refers to an electronic computing device such as, but not limited to, a single computer, virtual machine, virtual container, host, server, laptop, and/or mobile device, or to a plurality of electronic computing devices working together to perform the function described as being performed on or by the computing system. As used herein, the term “medium” refers to one or more non-transitory, computer-readable physical media that together store the contents described as being stored thereon. Embodiments may include non-volatile secondary storage, read-only memory (ROM), and/or random-access memory (RAM). As used herein, the term “application” refers to one or more computing modules, programs, processes, workloads, threads and/or a set of computing instructions executed by a computing system. Example embodiments of an application include software modules, software objects, software instances and/or other types of executable code.
As discussed herein various techniques and services that may be useful in support of a customer's use of resources on a cloud-based infrastructure are described. In accordance with these approaches, various functionalities such as in-place renaming of a client instance and/or migration of virtual IP (VIP addresses) are described. As may be appreciated, certain of these functionalities may be performed in response to a client request or instruction, such as in response to an acquisition or name change, while other may be performed in response to infrastructure or administrative issues, such as issues related to load balancing or network utilization. With this in mind, various techniques as discussed herein may be performed separately or together to accommodate customer and/or infrastructure needs.
With the preceding in mind, the following figures relate to various types of generalized system architectures or configurations that may be employed to provide services to an organization in a multi-instance framework and on which the present approaches may be employed. Correspondingly, these system and platform examples may also relate to systems and platforms on which the techniques discussed herein may be implemented or otherwise utilized. Turning now to
For the illustrated embodiment,
In
To utilize computing resources within the platform 16, network operators may choose to configure the data centers 18 using a variety of computing infrastructures. In one embodiment, one or more of the data centers 18 are configured using a multi-tenant cloud architecture, such that one of the server instances 26 handles requests from and serves multiple customers. Data centers 18 with multi-tenant cloud architecture commingle and store data from multiple customers, where multiple customer instances are assigned to one of the virtual servers 26. In a multi-tenant cloud architecture, the particular virtual server 26 distinguishes between and segregates data and other information of the various customers. For example, a multi-tenant cloud architecture could assign a particular identifier for each customer in order to identify and segregate the data from each customer. Generally, implementing a multi-tenant cloud architecture may suffer from various drawbacks, such as a failure of a particular one of the server instances 26 causing outages for all customers allocated to the particular server instance.
In another embodiment, one or more of the data centers 18 are configured using a multi-instance cloud architecture to provide every customer its own unique customer instance or instances. For example, a multi-instance cloud architecture could provide each customer instance with its own dedicated application server and dedicated database server. In other examples, the multi-instance cloud architecture could deploy a single physical or virtual server 26 and/or other combinations of physical and/or virtual servers 26, such as one or more dedicated web servers, one or more dedicated application servers, and one or more database servers, for each customer instance. In a multi-instance cloud architecture, multiple customer instances could be installed on one or more respective hardware servers, where each customer instance is allocated certain portions of the physical server resources, such as computing memory, storage, and processing power. By doing so, each customer instance has its own unique software stack that provides the benefit of data isolation, relatively less downtime for customers to access the platform 16, and customer-driven upgrade schedules. An example of implementing a customer instance within a multi-instance cloud architecture will be discussed in more detail below with reference to
Although
As may be appreciated, the respective architectures and frameworks discussed with respect to
By way of background, it may be appreciated that the present approach may be implemented using one or more processor-based systems such as shown in
With this in mind, an example computer system may include some or all of the computer components depicted in
The one or more processors 202 may include one or more microprocessors capable of performing instructions stored in the memory 206. Additionally or alternatively, the one or more processors 202 may include application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and/or other devices designed to perform some or all of the functions discussed herein without calling instructions from the memory 206.
With respect to other components, the one or more busses 204 include suitable electrical channels to provide data and/or power between the various components of the computing system 200. The memory 206 may include any tangible, non-transitory, and computer-readable storage media. Although shown as a single block in
With the preceding in mind,
With the preceding in mind, certain examples of functions or services that may be performed in furtherance of supporting a customer's use of a client instance 102 are described below. In a first example, an organization may request renaming of a client instance used by the organization (e.g., a uniform resource locator (URL) used by the organization to address and access their respective instance), such as in response to an acquisition or corporate name change which would lead to references to the prior name being improper.
In conventional approaches, the steps for renaming a client instance required a commitment of additional capacity that, once completed would not be needed. In particular, conventionally a new instance for the customer would be fully provisioned, such as with a new database and a pair of new application nodes corresponding to the new name, which would involve commitment of all resources needed to support new application nodes and a new database. Information would then be copied over to from the instance associated with the old name to the new instance associated with the new name. During this process, the client instance might be off-line (i.e., unavailable) for days at a time. Once completed, the customer would be pointed to the new instance (i.e., new application nodes and database) and the old instance would be taken off-line or removed.
This process is illustrated in
With this in mind, and turning to
Instead, new application nodes 320B are created that point to the original database 322. The database 322 is renamed to correspond to the new URL so that the new application nodes 320B properly reference and interact with the renamed database. As may be appreciated, the database 322 may include multiple tables, a database catalog, and/or configuration parameters that need to be adjusted or changed to be referenced or to reference using a new URL. In practice, renaming or otherwise addressing every occurrence of the original URL in the database 322 may involve a numerous structure query language (SQL) commands or queries. This may be difficult to implement in practice in that any changes in a SQL command or instruction may have to be propagated or addressed in the referencing instructions or syntax. In one embodiment, this issue may be addressed by combining or wrapping the multiple needed SQL commands in a single logical wrapper. That is, the wrapper can be addressed or implemented as a single command, though it contains or implements multiple SQL commands or queries wrapped or bundled together as a logical unit. In this example, changes to SQL commands or syntax may be made within the queries or commands within the wrapper without having to make additional changes to the commands or queries that call or reference the wrapper. Thus, the multiple commands or queries involved in renaming the database 322 can be bundled and handled as a single command while any needed changes can be made within the bundle without affecting the ability to call the SQL commands or queries in their bundled form.
In practice, the SQL command or query bundling may be handled as a command line tool that, in response to input arguments, runs a set of SQL commands and/or file processing commands to provide database renaming or other services. In the example of a database renaming operation as described herein, the bundled commands may include, but are not limited to, commands that: (1) rename SQL service related folders and configuration files; (2) create a new database with the new name; (3) execute a SQL “rename table” command to move all tables into the new database; and (4) remove the database with the old or original name. As noted above, in practice these commands may be bundled or wrapped so as to be logically implemented as a single command, allowing changes to be made to commands within the bundle as needed without having to alter or modify the commands or instructions that reference the bundle.
In the context of the present renaming approach, and as shown in
With respect to other functions or services that may be performed in furtherance of supporting a customer's use of a client instance 102, in a further example it may beneficial at times to migrate the a customer from one load balancer to another, such as due to the load balancer becoming overloaded in view of the number of instances supported and/or in view of the change in traffic over time. Each load balancer may have an associated virtual internet protocol (VIP address) utilized by the customer in addressing the load balancer to access their instance(s). Hence, such a migration is effectively moving a customer from one load balancer to another while retaining the same VIP to allow the customer to continue accessing their instances. It may be appreciated that, though a load balancer is used by way of example so as to provide a real-world context, in practice this instance accessing aspect may be generalized as an application delivery service, and may include a number of features in addition to or instead of the described server load balancing functionality, such as but not limited to firewall and virtual private network (VPN) functionality.
With the preceding in mind, it may on occasion be useful to move the client instances of one or more customers to a new load balancer, such as due to overloading of a given load balancer. Typically there is “one-to-one” mapping between a respective customer and the VIP address employed to reach their client instance, which as noted above, typically corresponds to a VIP address associated with a load balancer which directs the user to their instance. One caveat to this “one-to-one” relationship, however, may be that a secondary VIP address may also be employed which allows the user to access a standby load balancer in the event of failure or unavailability of the primary. Likewise, a second pair of primary and secondary VIP addresses may be available point to a geographically different data center in the event of unavailability of the primary data center. This, conceptually, there “is a one-to-one mapping between a customer and a VIP address through which they access their client instance(s), though in practice there may be various secondary and/or fallback VIP addresses allowing access to the client instance(s) in the event of unavailability of the primary load balancer and/or data center.
With respect to each VIP accessed by a user, there may actually be multiple instances accessible on the client platform. That is, there may be a “one-to-one relationship between customer and VIP, but a “many-to-one” relationship between VIP and client instances of a customer. As a result of the above observations, moving a VIP address to a new load balancer may be an involved task, as all client instances accessed through a VIP and the respective configurations of these instances should be moved concurrently. The present approach provides for the automated migration of a VIP address or multiple VIP addresses in an automated manner.
With this in mind, and turning to
At step 354, instances and pools associates with the VIP address(es) are identified to be included in the migration. As used herein, a pool is a collection of application nodes or servers that serve a given instance. In this manner, the instances and applications accessed by a user via the VIP address being migrated are identified as part of the migration.
At step 356 a pre-flight check may be performed. Such a check may be performed to ensure all identified instances can be migrated concurrently. By way of example, the check may determine whether tasks are running in a client instance and/or otherwise determine whether the target instances are prepared for migration. If not, the automated migration process may be stopped until such time as the instances involved are ready for migration.
Once the pre-flight check is passed, the VIP address migration may be performed (step 370). In the depicted example, the migration involves copying the VIP address info (e.g., the input VIP address and identified related VIP addresses) to the new load balancer. Pool and pool members are added to the new load balancer (step 372) as well.
Once VIP addresses and information copied to the new load balancer and pools and pool members are added to the new load balancer, routing is enabled on the new load balancer (step 376) and disabled on the old load balancer (step 378). Once routing is disabled on the old load balancer with respect to the migrated VIP addresses, the VIP address(es) may be deleted (step 380) on the old load balancer. A post-validation (step 384) may be performed to confirm that all respective client instances associated with the migrated VIP address(es) are on-line and that traffic routing is being performed correctly. Once post-validation is passed, the process ends (step 390).
Though
Turning to
The specific embodiments described above have been shown by way of example, and it should be understood that these embodiments may be susceptible to various modifications and alternative forms. It should be further understood that the claims are not intended to be limited to the particular forms disclosed, but rather to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of this disclosure.
The techniques presented and claimed herein are referenced and applied to material objects and concrete examples of a practical nature that demonstrably improve the present technical field and, as such, are not abstract, intangible or purely theoretical. Further, if any claims appended to the end of this specification contain one or more elements designated as “means for [perform]ing [a function] . . . ” or “step for [perform]ing [a function] . . . ”, it is intended that such elements are to be interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f). However, for any claims containing elements designated in any other manner, it is intended that such elements are not to be interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f).
