Oracle on AWS: With Tessell, performance is no laughing matter

Last year, someone from Oracle made a really funny video. They dubbed a Spanish broadcaster meme describing a project to migrate big Oracle workloads to AWS:

I was PMing at this bank. AWS came along and said: “We can move all your enterprise apps to AWS in 12 months.”

…We’re pumping one million transactions through per second! So we said, “How are you going to handle the IO and the availability?”

Some 23-year-old guy stands up - he’s their “Senior Engineer”. I knew that because he was wearing the expensive sneakers. 

And says: “RDS”

Spoiler alert: It didn’t go well.

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Oracle is the world’s second-largest software company. Despite continually increasing competition, Oracle still easily leads the enterprise database market - and for good reason. No other database provides the same level of performance, stability, and ecosystem support that Oracle commands. 

But the leading public cloud providers face challenges in cost-effectively achieving the high performance required for many of Oracle's database workloads. The same is true for enabling true business continuity. 

The Performance Disadvantage of Traditional Cloud Infrastructure

Traditional cloud architecture consists of servers accessing storage across the network. While fine for general-purpose workloads, this infrastructure fails to deliver the performance (measured in IOPS - or Input/output operations per second) required by many resource-demanding databases. To compensate, the hyperscalers have invented a provisioned IOPS construct and charge customers who need high IOPS/throughput. This cost quickly escalates, making it economically unattractive to put demanding database workloads in the cloud.

Both Azure and AWS provide compute options that use local NVMe. While extremely high-performant, the storage is ephemeral. A server reboot means you lose all your data. Obviously, this is not ideal for any production database let alone one that is mission-critical.

Introducing Tessell

A DBaaS startup, Tessell, turns this high-performance NVMe (local storage) into durable, zero-data loss  data infrastructure while also delivering a full-fledged DB management service. As a result, customers get rid of their provisioned IOPS cost and also enjoy an elegant, API-driven DBaaS platform for their choice of cloud.

For example, Tessell can support instances that can give you terabytes of storage and up to one million IOPS at a flat rate. With this extraordinary performance, we will soon see customers migrating even their on-premises Exadata Oracle workloads to both Azure and AWS.

Today, most DBaaS services are limited to undifferentiated “heavy lifting” database tasks such as provisioning, backup/restore, HA, etc. Tessell not only fulfills all of these existing capabilities, but also takes DBaaS to a new level by enabling “differentiated” data management. And Tessell delivers this enterprise grade data management with elegant consumer-grade interfaces and open APIs.

Think of Tessell as RDS+++. Performance is the first “plus”, but Tessell has two more big pluses as well: Data Delight/Disaster Recovery and Data @ Your Terms.

Data Delight / Disaster Recovery

Tessell lets customers automatically anonymize and securely share data with secondary environments. Developers, QA, and UAT can browse and consume obfuscated data in a policy-driven self-service access manner. And users (with the right permissions) can easily restore data from any point in time down to the second. 

With Tessell, disaster recovery is no longer an audit checkmark and a prayer. Tessell provides fully managed disaster recovery including cross-region availability. You can test DR failover whenever desired with a mouse click. 

Data @Your Terms

The third “plus” in RDS+++ is Tessell’s ability to provide Data @Your Terms. I’m working with a prospect with a mission-critical application requiring access to database services. Their hyperscaler’s DBaaS offerings do not allow this capability. Tessell, on the other hand, has a feature called “Genie” that enables, with customer permission, not only visibility of local data, but also access to it.

Data @Your Terms means you can let Tessell manage your databases on Tessell’s Azure or AWS cloud account; you can run on your own unshared virtual private cloud; or you can continue with your own Azure or AWS account - but Tessell manages your data. With this option, you do not need to learn and adopt the hyperscaler security and governance policies and requirements. You can also bring your own Oracle (and other database) licensing.

Tessell Makes it Easy to Migrate Databases to Cloud

Organizations often find that databases are their major obstacle to cloud migration. Tessell eliminates this challenge by enabling, if desired, phased database migration to Azure or AWS while providing exceptional Cloud DR/BC in the interim. 

You simply replicate your on-premises database to Tessell in the cloud and sync the two instances. Once you’re ready to switch your primary environment to Tessell, the same mouse click fails over to DR, and then you can replicate between regions for resiliency.

The platform's intuitive and streamlined approach to deploying cloud databases eliminates the need for manual and repetitive data management tasks, freeing up developers and data engineers to concentrate on creating great products, satisfying customers, and driving business success. 

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If you enjoyed the Oracle video, for more chuckles, check out a preview of the database world’s new comic superhero, The Tessellator, and her sidekick Auto-Mask, as they tessellate not just data stored in Oracle, but also in SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres. 

Disclaimer: This article is personal and reflects the opinions of the author, not necessarily those of Tessell.