Containerizing Databases with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Because more and more enterprises are considering containerization as a new application deployment model, Red Hat hopes to make the adoption of container technology as smooth as possible for our customers. We are evaluating and testing various workloads in-house and spend a good chunk of our engineering time developing, integrating, and testing a trusted, supported application platform stack for containerized applications. The recent announcement of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform image moves us even closer to the goal: we now have another certified platform that can run applications as complex as Oracle Database in a container (see video below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCzNCYQvEtI

Databases are among the most widely deployed applications out there and are often seen as the hardest to deploy. Containers promise to ease that pain

and also to help with the preservation of existing installations by moving database software into a container. Re-deploying a container on newer hardware, at a different location or creating clones of the entire environment can lower the risks that are often associated with such operations due to the business-critical nature of databases in the enterprise.

To date, we have evaluated MariaDB, Oracle Database and MongoDB (see video below) running in containers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux base images. In fact, we no longer simply test, we go one step further and stress the applications with meaningful workloads to evaluate interesting use cases and advanced features. Using MongoDB as an example, you’ll notice that we did not simply deploy the database in a container, but rather that we’ve demonstrated how to deploy a MongoDB sharded cluster using containers. In the case of Oracle databases, the first video (above) showcased Oracle 11gR2 and Oracle 12c running under load on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 using container technology and provided a comparison to the data obtained from a bare-metal hardware configuration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HghNcxMm-k

Given the rate of innovation in the community and the number of ISVs interested in the technology, containerization is quickly becoming an engaging conversation topic for both developers and IT Ops. As we continue to push our platform beyond its present boundaries, we need to make sure that the variety of applications and workloads that customers are accustomed to running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux are not adversely affected. How are you using containers today? Do you have plans to containerize your databases in the future?  Please leave your thoughts and comments below - we look forward to hearing from you!