Cloud Native Infrastructure with Azure

Chapter 9. Distributed Databases and Storage: The Central Bank

One of the largest hurdles to overcome when building a cloud native infrastructure is operating reliable and scalable storage for both online and offline use. While earlier sentiment around storage services being run in the cloud was frowned upon, a number of cloud native storage projects have succeeded, the most prominent being Vitess. Cloud services, including Azure, have also significantly invested in managed disks for virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets, as well as advanced storage accounts (such as Gen2) and managed database services (such as MySQL, SQL Server, and Redis). All of this has made storage a first-class concept in Azure’s cloud. In this chapter, we will look at why you should run storage solutions at scale in Azure and how you can orchestrate them in a way that is easy to manage.

The Need for Distributed Databases in Cloud Native Architecture

Although Azure provides a number of managed data (both SQL and NoSQL) solutions, sometimes you may need to run larger and more specialized setups while operating in the cloud. The ecosystem of self-operated Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) database projects will allow you to scale to a larger size than Azure platform as a service (PaaS) services provide, and will give you more features and performance options.

As this chapter will further discuss, the CNCF landscape lays out a set of storage solutions that are primarily designed for cloud ...