Conf42 Cloud Native 2021 - Online

Multi-Cloud Magic: Leveraging Multi-Cloud Clusters in Real-World Scenarios

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Abstract

Public, Private, Hybrid…Multi-Cloud?

As the cloud development options and architectures continue to evolve, we’ve finally found ourselves at the next new thing: Multi-Cloud. What is it? Do we really need it? How would you take advantage of a multi-cloud solution?

In this talk, I’d like to describe a few real-world use cases where a multi-cloud solution is currently in production, specifically when it comes to data.

Specifically, we’ll see how multi-cloud helps: - Data Sovereignty scenarios - Fulfill varied client cloud requirements - Developers have more freedom in choosing services - Achieve greater availability

A demo on how to setup a multi-cloud cluster will also be shown.

The audience will leave with a more confident understanding of real-world, multi-cloud use cases and see how to create their own!

Summary

  • Adrian Teka is a senior developer advocate for MongoDB. He will talk about the different ways that you can use multicloud clusters in real world scenarios. Finally we'll see how to actually set up our own cluster and see how easy it is to do in MongoDB Atlas.
  • Multicloud is any single architectures that uses two or more cloud providers. This can also mean that it's a mixture of public and private clouds. We're going to be focusing on the big three. So that's AWS, GCP and Azure.
  • When was the last time that you had to deal with an outage of some sort of managed service? If we go back two years, we'll kind of see a timeline of how many of these outages have occurred and how much impact they had. What is important to know is that no cloud is spared from the pain.
  • Next is Mohan Pucha, who's the vice president of architecture and digital strategy at Aon. He says we have to be native AWS because of their advanced capabilities in analytics. Now in the real world, we will be seeing how some different multicloud solutions are used.
  • Canada has this direction for electronic data residency. All sensitive electronic data that's under government control needed to be located within the geographic boundaries of Canada. A couple provinces have actually gone a little bit further than that.
  • An emergency services application used multicloud to give them higher availability while still complying with this directive. Another very similar one is Australia passed some similar legislation. In both cases, companies were able to spread availability across multiple regions.
  • A client wanted to add a recommendation feature to their internal help desk software. One of the common ways to solve this problem is to write custom code. But that's not necessarily the best case because that's a lot of maintenance to put into something that is super custom and it's another thing to maintain. Multi-cloud clusters are the best solution.
  • Next is another very, I will say, experimental, and this is still being worked. If they're able to work out the kinks would make multicloud a really, really awesome options. But there are still very slight differences between the cloud providers.
  • A major auto manufacturing company had most of their applications primarily on AWS. They were able to negotiate better pricing deals at Azure. Being able to migrate over that quickly and that seamlessly was something that was very appealing. Depending on the size of data, multicloud clusters could be a nice thing to supplement that kind of architectures.
  • As we evolve and start to use more of these cloud services, we find that sometimes we want to use some of the other tools that may be on other cloud providers. The next thing that us as devs will have to worry about now is making sure that we're as cloud agnostic as possible.
  • Another common use case is that we have european companies who acquire other companies. They want a graceful rollover and they want to make sure that it all properly cuts over. Multi cloud cluster made sense because they already had MongoDB Atlas foundation. This allowed them to do this cross cloud migration much more gracefully.
  • The data has been the bottleneck for many of these scenarios. By using something like a multicloud cluster, they're able to move closer to that. And so now I'm going to quickly roll over and show you how easy it is to set up a cluster.
  • Thank you for taking the time to listen to me talk about multi cloud clusters. If you have any questions, please feel free to find me either on Twitter or in the chat. Enjoy the rest of Comp 42.

Transcript

This transcript was autogenerated. To make changes, submit a PR.
Hi everyone, welcome to Comp 42 cloud native confident. I am Adrian Teka and I'm a senior developer advocate for MongoDB. And today I'd like to talk to you about multicloud magic. So let's start on this journey. We're first going to get on the same page. We're going to say what is multicloud? Because you may have heard it before, you may have seen the buzzword flown around or seen it around the Internet, and it's really just a simple definition, but it's important to be on the same page. So we know weve we're going in the context of this presentation. After that we'll move on to the next likely question you might have, which is do we really need a multicloud option? Then we'll get into the bulk of my presentation, which is the different ways that you can use multicloud clusters in real world scenarios. And then finally weve going to see how to actually set up our own cluster and see how easy it is to do in MongoDB Atlas. So we'll start at the beginning, what is multicloud? And if you have an idea or if you have a different definition, I'm curious to hear. So feel free to let me know either in the chat or after the presentation. But for the context of this presentation, multicloud is probably the first instinct that you had when you thought about this question. And that's any single architectures that uses two or more cloud providers. And for the context of this, weve going to be focusing on the big three. So that's AWS, GCP and Azure. And as part of this multi cloud architecture, this can also mean that it's a mixture of public and private clouds. So as long as you're using two or more of the public providers or two or more of the big three, I should say, then it should be classified as a multicloud architectures. So two or more cloud providers within this same architecture is what we designate as a multicloud kind of solution. So next, do we really need a multicloud option? And I want you to think, when was the last time that you had to deal with an outage of some sort of managed service? Maybe there were a few in the last few months, maybe there were some really large ones that caused some production issues for you. Think about it for a second. Now, we know that outages are not really uncommon, but we also don't think that they happen as often as they do. And unfortunately that's kind of the case. If we go back two years, we'll kind of see a timeline of how many of these outages have actually occurred and how much impact they had. In June of 2019, there was a really large one from Google Cloud outage. It was so large that they called it the catch 22 that broke the Internet. Now, what happened here was Google usually runs these routine configuration changes. They do these maintenance events often, and it's not something abnormal. In this particular case, they had one of those same usual maintenance events, and they intended for this to be applied to only a few servers in a specific geographic region. But when that happened and when this particular outage occurred, there was a combination of misconfigurations and some bugs in the software that led to the automation piece of the software, descheduling network control jobs in multiple locations. So what that amounted to is wired had a really good analogy. If you think about all the traffic that's running through Google and the Internet, and you think of all of that data running through numerous tunnels, what happened after that occurred was that those tunnels effectively got blocked. And there weve only two tunnels from maybe like six tunnels that they had running that allowed data to flow through. And effectively this resulted in an Internet wide gridlock. But it wasn't just Google. AWS also suffered their own outages in this particular case. Reading from the retrospective that they gave according to what happened in this outage, they say this event was caused by a failure of our data center control system, which is used to control and optimize the various cooling systems used in our data centers. So what happened here is the control system had some third party code that dealt with the interactions between the devices within the data center. So the things that communicated with the fans, with the chillers and the temperature sensors, there was a bug in this particular piece of third party software. And that bug caused the exchange of many, many interactions in the millions and effectively, again, this cases the control system to become unresponsive. And when that happened, the rest of the fiasco kind of unraveled, right? Raxo services started overheating, and that bug caused multiple redundant cooling systems to fail in many parts of the affected availability zones. And then we see Google again, right? March of 2020, they had a significant router failure in a data center in Atlanta. And Azure is not immune to this either. Specifically, when the pandemic hit, we really started to see the limits of what our cloud providers can offer us. As we started to all work from home, many of us started to use the Internet a lot more, conduct business meetings, team meetings, do everything online and started to use more of these services. We really saw how much of a toll that took on provider like Azure. As an example, they shared some stats for some of their services. So right at the height of the pandemic around April of 2020, they showed that the Microsoft Teams usage really, really spiked. So Microsoft Teams is their video conferencing software. And just as an example, they had about 44 million daily users, which generated over 900 million meeting minutes and calling minutes on teams in a single week. That is incredibly unexpected in terms of how much new traffic and unexpected and really scaled traffic that they did not expect. And we saw that with these outages and with the shortages that they were experiencing in this particular case, they really felt it in Europe and on and on. Right. Azure also had another one in terms of bottlenecks in the APAC region in June of 2020. And the most recent one that was fairly large was the AWS outage that took down a big chunk of the Internet. And that was in November of 2020 for the Kinesis data streams outage. So in between all of these kind of larger outages that you may have seen or have experienced, and if you were thinking about my question prior to starting this kind of timeline, you may have even more examples of these scenarios where you had some outages that really caused some issues. And what we want to see here is that we know that, again, that outages are not impossible, that they never happen. We know that they occur. What is more important to see in this timeline and in the examples and events that you may have experienced yourself is that no cloud is spared from the outages. And this is a very important point, because a lot of companies who are kind of feeling the pain of vendor lock in, for example, or those who are slowly migrating to the cloud and are only considering a single cloud if they are a company that needs to be global or needs to be highly available, this is something that is near and dear to their heart. This is something that is a very big portion that can impact the user's perception of their application and is also something that they may worry about in terms of their uptime. So the fact that no cloud is spared from outages means that, yes, we can kind of confidently say that this is an issue if we are on a specific cloud provider or only a single cloud provider. And we have run into issues before where an outage on one has caused problems. So that's more on the consumer side and of us experiencing the outages ourselves. But also in June of 2020, we took a look at this report from this CIO think tank. So what happened here was they got around 30 it leaders in a variety of tech companies and they started to talk about multicloud. What does that look like? How do we actually implement it? Is it worth it to consider a multicloud architecture for the various architectures they have and the different industries that they have? And for the most part, these CIOs across the board acknowledge that it's not a matter of if, but a matter of when that they're going to use multicloud. And it would come to a variety of reasons of why they are not on there yet. But there are a few quotes that I see here that really set the tone, really captures the essence of why I think multicloud is becoming more prevalent and a more approachable solution for many of these companies as they grow. So the first one is Gregory Sherman, he's a vp of business platform technology for Fiserv, and that is an american multinational Fortune 500 company and they provide financial services. So what he says is the main driver is what our clients are asking for. We have banks who have an Azure preference, we have banks who have an AWS preference, Google Cloud and on and on, we don't really get to choose. And that's incredibly key for multi cloud because there are many industries like Fiserv who may have clients like this. In their case, their clients include banks, credit unions, security brokers, dealers, leveraging and finance companies. And especially in very regulated industries like that, sometimes Pfizer does not have the option, they need to give the option to their clients of where to hold their data or where to host their applications. And so that's why multi cloud is something that is not just a nice to have, but almost a necessary thing for this particular company. Next is Mohan Pucha, who's the vice president of architecture and digital strategy at Aon. Now, Aeon is another multinational company that offers financial risk migration products. And what he says is we have to be native AWS because of their advanced capabilities in analytics and we have to be in azure because frankly, developers love that ecosystem and productive developers are probably the best thing. So I really like this quote, because it not only speaks to the fact that maybe multicloud is a decision that comes from the top down, but it's actually also coming from the bottom up, or from developers who are having more autonomy in their decisions. And as developers, we want to use the best tools for the job. So this is incredibly exciting because most of the scenarios we've seen of why multicloud has previously been difficult thing to kind of implement is being made easier with something like a multicloud cluster, and we'll see why. A lot of the scenarios I will show very soon, almost next slide is that the biggest bottleneck is having data portability for their applications, and so we'll see how those are actually used. Now in the real world, we will be seeing how some different multicloud solutions are used on the basis of multicloud clusters. We'll start with some very common use cases where multicloud is a very easy thing for clients to kind of choose and migrate towards, and that's data sovereignty and data residency issues. So in this particular case, Canada has this direction for electronic data residency. Now, the Government of Canada, every few years or so, they write out a strategic it plan that is to be dispersed throughout all of the government entities. What they put in this plan is just some best practices, some directives for how they are to implement different it policies. And in this particular case, one of them is called the direction of electronic data residency. So what does that mean? This stated that all sensitive electronic data that's under government control needed to be located within the geographic boundaries of Canada. Now, there are a few options with, you know, there cloud be some locations abroad that have been pre approved by the Government of Canada, like diplomatic or consular missions, but for the most part, those are very rare. And ultimately, all of the data, at least the sensitive data that they have classified as sensitive data, needs to remain within the geographic boundaries of Canada. So a couple provinces have actually gone a little bit further than that. British Columbia and Nova Scotia, they have said that all of the data, well, they pretty much align with the initial strategic plan, but they do follow it to a t. So that's all government data. Public schools, healthcare services, governmental public data, those all go and have to remain within Canada, whereas Ontario, they only are applying this to health records and health data. And that brings us to the first kind of scenario that I want to share with you, which is the story of an emergency services application and how they used multicloud to give them higher availability while still complying with this directive. So for the most part, most of these companies, including our emergency services application client, was hosting their data on AWS Montreal. And that's not too far fetched to think of, because last time I checked, the market share pretty much belonged to AWS for now with 34%. And most companies are on AWS. And in this particular case, this region, they all had to be on AWS Montreal, because that's the only one AWS offers. So in this scenario, that's not a great thing, because let's say this happens, let's say AWS Montreal goes out for one reason or another, even though it's rare. We have seen before in the last timeline that it's not as rare as we think. And when this occurs, and assuming that your application was not built to fail over properly or did not have the means to, then your application will also fail. It will also be out. And for an application like an emergency services application, outages are not only annoying, they're almost unacceptable in this case. And we know that this is a really negative outlook for any company, right? Any type of application downtime where your users can't access your product or your services, that always, almost always translates to either financial loss or some sort of reputation loss, because nobody likes to deal with an application that's not working. And what really drove it home for this emergency services application is that the recent AWS outage of November of 2020 did not help. It did not make them feel confident at all that they could rely on this single region on AWS. So what did they do? Well, they already took advantage of another cloud provider they had to that was still within Montreal, and the only other region that was there, or only other cloud provider that provided that same region was GCP. So they took advantage of that and set up a failover strategy that way. And because they wanted to be extra fault tolerant or wanted to have that built in, they also took advantage of two other regions that Azure provided. So there is an Azure Canada central region, which is based in Toronto, and an Azure Canada east region that is based in Quebec. And so now in this type of architectures, they're feeling very confident that no matter what kind of outages may occur, they would be okay. They will not have an outage. They will still be able to access their application. So again, if AWS Montreal goes out, no problem, GCP can step up and fill in the gap there. And in the even more rare but still plausible scenario that the entire region of Montreal just goes out, well, that's when the azure regions can step up and fill in the gap in those outages. So that's the canadian example of kind of abiding and still being compliant to this data residency requirement while still taking advantage of the other providers. They almost had to specifically for this client because of the type of application that they had, they did not want to have outages. And so that was a very great use case for multicloud clusters. Another very similar one is Australia. Now, Australia passed some similar legislation. This one is called the My Health Records act of 2012, and that pretty much states that there's the requirement to not hold or take records, health records outside of Australia. So if we take a look at the cloud providers and regions in the Australia landscape, you'll find that most of them are pretty much here in Sydney. There's a GCP region in Sydney and there's an AWS region in Sydney. But as you'll see, this still is prone to the same problems before that. If you are on either one GCP or AWS, if you had a regional outage, well, you're out of luck there because those are the only two that were available there in Sydney. In order to fight against that. Again, in this scenario, Azure with their Melbourne region, in this case the Australia Southeast region, gave these companies a different opportunity to be able to spread their availability across multiple regions. So not just the cloud providers, but across multiple regions. In the particular case of Australia, what Azure actually found was that they had another kind of policy that required some in country disaster recovery options. And so with that, they actually added two additional regions in Canberra, one Australia central and Australia central, two built specifically for this kind of compliance issue. And if you were wondering, they also do have one in Sydney, in case you wanted to collect them all. But again, the point of this is to show that Australia is a fairly large continent, and if you wanted to work in any of the other territories and needed to service those other territories, well, you're going to need to start making use of the other cloud providers. So those are kind of the low hanging fruit scenarios of these multicloud clusters in play. And now I want to talk about some actual situations where they use multicloud clusters and where we're seeing some different use cases of how multi cloud has solved different problems. This next one is called it the recommendation feature. In this particular case, we had a client who had some workloads and they were running on AWS. Now, to be transparent, they were already using MongoDB Atlas to host their database and host their data, and they were hosted on the AWS region. They were hosting an AWS and this application was an internal help desk software type of application. As they started to expand and as they started to grow, they wanted to add a recommendation feature. And when they spoke to their developers who weve about to implement this, they took some time, researched and found that hey, we want to use Automl, which is a Google service, and it's basically a tool that uses machine learning to reveal the structure and meaning of text. So they wanted to use this to be able to tap into not only their production data, live data and patterns, but also the knowledge base that they had so that they could recommend potentially relevant knowledge base articles for the help desk technicians when they were using this software. And so now with this kind of scenarios, the big glaring thing here now is, well, how do we get that data over there? We need to get data over there somehow in order to be able to use this tool. Or at least that was the goal, because that would make it much easier to integrate and use the automl tool for this proposed analytics application that was to serve as their recommendation feature. So what do you think were the potential options for this? Well, to start, one of the common ways we've already solved this problem is to write custom code. Custom code. It works and it will always work, but it's not necessarily the best option. As most of us know, if you've ever done any kind of custom scripting like this before, these kinds of things are always unique. They're too purpose built, they're only made and written in a specific way that is solely to solve this problem. And that is a big reason why yes, it will work, but it's not necessarily the best case because that's a lot of maintenance to put into something that is super custom and it's another thing to maintain. And even as devs, we know this pain, right, we know that this is something that we don't want to do or try to avoid at all costs. And so even if we try to automate that kind of pain away by say, using something like kafka, which is something that can stream updates from one source to another, for this particular client's case, it was just another piece that they did not want to maintain. It was an additional service that they just did not want to set up. And so this was not the option that they chose, nor was it the best one for their scenario. So the next option then is something called backup and restore. So in this scenario, we would be taking live snapshots of their live data on AWS and we would restore it over to GCP or wherever they had the other database hosted at the time and have it analyzed. But again, this was another costly ETL process that they did not want to maintain. It's another separate piece and too many pieces weve something that they just did not want. So the bigger issue with this option too is that when they would work with the data and work with the snapshots, it was usually done in batches, which meant the analysts that were trying to use this data for this application, this analytics application, they were always waiting for new data to be uploaded. So they were always working with somewhat stale data and it just was not working for them. So in this particular case, something like a multi cloud cluster really was the best option for this scenario. Now, again, they were already using MongoDB Atlas. This is part of why this option was much more appealing than the other two. And by having the same underlying cloud database support all the different kinds of workloads that they had, it made it a very easy decision to say, yeah, multicloud cluster makes sense in our case and what we want to do here. So how did they achieve this? Well, they did spin up an analytics node to be able to work with their analytics application, and they spun that up on GCP. So what this means is they used a specific node that is meant for analytics, it is meant for complex, for long running operations. And the better part is that this was separate from their production workloads, their operational workloads, the ones that are running on AWS. So while they can use the GCP node to their heart's content for any kind of analysis and to fuel the automl tool for their analytics application, their AWS workloads remain untouched. They're not competing for additional resources, and they can stay focused on servicing the production workloads for their application. So this was a very good fit for multicloud clusters in their very specific scenario. Next is another very, I will say, experimental, and this is still being worked. But it is something that is an interesting idea that if they're able to work out the kinks would make multicloud a really, really awesome options. So this client had some workloads, and what they wanted to do was be able to burst those workloads to whichever cloud provider had the best pricing at the time. So they wanted to take advantage of any pricing fluctuations and send their workloads that way. So, for example, if Azure had the best pricing for them at that point, they would love to be able to move that workload over there or send some that way. And likewise, as things fluctuated, let's say AWS met that kind of threshold they had of whatever pricing they were choosing for, they could also send some workloads that way and onward, right? If for whatever reason GCP also went down, send them there. So this is kind of the holy grail of this particular production, but there's still a long way to go, and the reason for that is even though we try to generalize these workloads, these tasks that we tried to do, there are still very slight differences between the cloud providers that still make it fairly difficult to kind of do this as seamlessly as they want to. So it's already a very large step in that the data is already available that was already a big bottleneck that they had that was removed by using something like a multicloud cluster. And having the data readily available on all three of those makes this, it's a step closer to reality and possibility of being able to do this. But they are still working out those kinks with the slight configuration differences between them. But I'll definitely update you if they get this to work. And finally, there's a last kind of almost very extreme scenario of cost optimization here. So this client was a major auto manufacturing company, and what they did was they had most of their applications primarily on AWS, and their workloads were running on AWS. But what they did was they had some conversations, and they had some conversations in tandem, they had some negotiations with aws and also with Azure. And what resulted from those conversations was that, let's say they had some better pricing deals at Azure. Well, they wanted to be able to switch just like that. Literally just like that. They wanted to be able to let their engineers know and say, hey, we were able to negotiate this better pricing deal for the amount of workloads that we're about to put onto this cloud provider. And so being able to migrate over that quickly and that seamlessly was something that was very appealing and something that multicloud could offer. How would it do this? So again, if they were based on a multi cloud cluster, which was something to consider, what could occur was that they could have their original clusters hosted in AWS, but the moment that they needed to switch over, they would just have to change the provider. They would just have to change the highest priority cloud provider in the cluster's configuration settings. And you can do this via the atlas Ui, or you could do this via the command line. And so this would gracefully roll over to the destination cloud provider that they wanted to do, and that would allow them to be able to make these kinds of very quick changes. Now, of course, caveat. Depending on the size of data they had, depending on if their applications were architected in a way that cloud take advantage of this, where it was truly just the data needing to be migrated over different cloud providers, then yes, this is a possibility. Right. So I just want to preface that and not to kind of just generalize and say yes, do a multicloud cluster and all your problems are solved. That's not the case. Your applications need to be architectures in a way that could take advantage of that. And if they are, then multicloud clusters could be a very nice thing to supplement that kind of architectures that you're looking for. So weve spoken about these different client scenarios and now I want to talk about how this affects developers. So as devs we again want to use the best tools for the job. If you ask anyone in your network, if you have looked at the Internet, if you have read anything about any part of cloud development, you'll know that there are preferences. You might have your own preferences about what to use and from where. You ask devs and they'll say yes, I only use AWS Lambda because it's the best tool for the job. Or if you want to do anything with machine leveraging or artificial intelligence, most developers will say yeah, GCP is the place to go there, although Azure is catching up quite quickly. But for the most part they did have a stronghold. And when you think ML and AI, you think GCP's platform. And then there is a very large segment of developers who are also on the Azure ecosystem. A lot of european companies are full azure ecosystems, and so in that scenario they want to use Azure DevOps, they want to use Azure active directory. But as we start to evolve and start to use more of these cloud services, as we start to expand, we find that sometimes we do want to use some of the other tools that may be on other cloud providers, especially if we are on a single cloud provider now or have been feeling the pains of some vendor lock in. Maybe the initial choice that was made when you moved to the cloud was not the best one, and you find that another one would actually serve you better. There are all kinds of reasons why we would want that flexibility to be able to use the best tool for the job. And so something like a multicloud cluster can help you get there. And the reason we say this is because for the most part, the biggest bottleneck has been the data. It's always been how do we move the relevant data that we need to use the services that we need on these other cloud providers? And now there's a plausible solution for that through multicloud clusters. The next thing as developers that we need to consider is that we're now pretty much responsible for even higher availability and even lower latency. So with all the outages that have occurred and as we expand and have to cover global markets, there's more of an ask for us to be sure that we can provide the same experience to all of our customers, to anyone that's using our application. And so there are a lot of reasons why we may need to take advantage of other cloud providers regions, either because there's a region that is only covered by one cloud provider, which is very common, or you need to have absolute availability for very specific applications like the emergency services application, where outages are not possible, they should never occur. And so in this kind of architecture, having a multicloud cluster gives us a much wider range and a much larger set of regions to work with to help us solve these problems and make sure we're able to deliver with these kinds of asks for availability. And lastly, as we start to become more comfortable with this and start to use multicloud clusters and start making it easier for our applications to take advantage of all of the cloud providers if it warrants it. I think the next thing that us as devs will have to worry about now is making sure that we're as cloud agnostic as possible. So wherever we happen to put our data, or wherever our clients ask us to put our data, if we're in a similar industry like Fiserv, where we don't get to choose, having that availability to serve the customers where they are is our ultimate goal. So now I'll quickly go through the last kind of scenario that we've seen where multicloud has also been a great fit, and that's future proofing, specifically with mergers and acquisitions. So another very common use case is that we have european companies who acquire other companies, and the european companies are mostly based in Azure. They're a full Azure ecosystem. And when they acquire these other companies, most of these acquisitions, they are on AWS. So what needs to happen now is the cross cloud migration. So how does this work? Well, again, custom scripting is always an option, but we already know about the flaws with that, so I'll already move on to the next one. Now, in this particular scenario, this acquisition that occurred, again, this client was already in MongoDB Atlas, and with that there was the option to use live migration, which is something that is offered through MongoDB Atlas. So what happens here is that they could set up a destination Atlas cluster in Azure, and that would then live migrate from the AWS clouds and the AWS nodes over to Azure. But the problem with this, even with this option in Atlas already, is that again, it's a separate service and it's also a very big hassle, because the connection string needs to be properly cut over. You would need to bounce it to make sure that the traffic is now going to the correct place. And even this little bit of manual intervention just was not a good thing for them. They did not want this, they wanted it to be more seamless than what was already possible. So again, in this particular case, multi cloud cluster made sense. And this is because what they already had, they already had MongoDB Atlas foundation. They needed to do was just change the cluster settings to not only be a multi cloud cluster, but to also change the highest priority region and cloud provider to be from AWS to Azure. So how does this do this? Right, the whole reason they choose this is that they want a graceful rollover and they want to make sure that it all properly cuts over. Well, by default, MongoDB always has a three node replica set. That's a minimum. And this is always so that we can ensure at least a reliable election with the bare minimum of three. That means there's one primary and there's two secondaries. Now, when we would begin this kind of cross cloud migration through a multi cloud cluster, we would first start migrating over the first two secondaries, so we'd migrate over the ones on AWS over to Azure, and then we would elect a new primary. So the previous primary was on AWS, but now we would ensure that it was now on the new cloud provider, which is azure, and then finally we would migrate over the remaining secondary. And what was really great about this was that of course it was all automated and taken care of by MongoDB Atlas. But the best part about it was you did not have to change the connection string, which was the biggest point of contention in this scenario. So this allowed them to do this cross cloud migration much more gracefully, and to also ensure that once this migration was finished, that it would properly move traffic over the right way without any downtime. And that's kind of the buffet of scenarios where multicloud is being used and is benefiting specific situations. And so now I will quickly go through how to create one. But before I do that, the last thing I'll leave you with is another quote from that think tank that I mentioned earlier was from Brad Lewis, and he's the vp and global lead from Dell Technologies, and he basically says if you want to start to have true portability of applications, obviously the data has to go with the application. And so this is why multicloud clusters have become a step in the right direction when it comes to even thinking about a multicloud solution, because the data has been the bottleneck for many of these scenarios and a lot of these customers. But by using something like a multicloud cluster, they're able to move closer to that multicloud strategy and take advantage of it. And so now I'm going to quickly roll over and show you how easy it is to set up a cluster. So if you've ever gone through the MongoDB Atlas UI and created a cluster, you'll see that this is what you are faced with, right? You decide which cloud provider and region you want to use, and that's where your initial cluster would be hosted. But now, if you wanted to do a multicloud cluster like I've been talking about, then you would just turn this on. And what this does is it basically shows you a couple more options. You now have the ability to choose from electable nodes, which are the ones that are the only ones that participate in elections. That means they're the ones that can be elected to be a primary in your production workloads or your operational workloads. And you also have read only nodes to choose from. So these are great for, let's say you have some markets that are really far away from where you are based in, but we need to make sure those reads for those markets are just as lightning fast as the ones in your local area. Well, you can spin up additional comes in those markets and have them point to those nodes and make it much nicer and faster and equivalent to these regions to be able to read for any of your service areas. And finally, there are a third type of node, which is the analytics node. And this is the one that the automl recommendation feature took advantage of. And this is the one that they chose when they set up an analytics node in GCP. But for now, I'll just show you how to set up a cluster really quick. So I'm going to choose actually GCP as my highest provider region because I am based in Las Vegas and they technically would be the closest one to me. And in this case, I'm going to set up what's called a two two one node distribution. So you'll see here, we always, always want to make sure that we have an odd number of comes, and that's to ensure reliable elections. If we had an even number, it's a possibility to have an elections be split down the middle and we would not be able to elect a proper primary. So this is why we ask for an odd number of nodes. So I'll add a couple more here, we'll choose the next closest regions to me and AWS. Remember, we want an odd number, so I'll do a two two one here. And in this kind of node distribution, this is kind of the bare node minimum that you would need to be able to provide equivalent read and write availability guarantees for your cluster. So this would be the multicloud cluster I'd have. I'd have the highest priority in Las Vegas and Azure and AWS as my secondaries. And because I don't want to make you wait and watch this cluster being generated, I've already done that. So this is what it would look like. You'll see that you had a preferred region in GCP, just as I've asked, with some secondaries in the AWS north region and the Azure California region as my scenarios. And if you remember when I said in a couple of the scenarios where all they had to do was change the provider, well, it really is just like that. You can either do this through the CLI, or if you needed to move over and change the cloud provider that you would have, you would just go over here and you would set the highest row to be your new highest priority cloud provider. So if I wanted to do what I just did here, which is set Azure to be my highest priority cloud provider and migrate some nodes over to Azure, this is all I would have to change. And let's go back here. And that's really how quickly it is to set it up. Obviously it'll take a little bit more time for the nodes to be deployed and all of that, but in terms of setting it up, that is all you would have to configure. If you wanted to set up a multi cloud cluster, this is also available to if you already had an existing MongoDB cluster that was not yet a multi cloud designation, you would also change it in the same fashion, and they are eligible to be changed into a multi cloud cluster in that way. And that's it. So, salamat, that means thank you in Tagalog. Thank you for taking the time to listen to me talk about multi cloud clusters. If you have any questions, please feel free to find me either on Twitter or in the chat. I will be here and I'll do my best to answer your questions. Thanks so much and I hope you enjoy. Enjoy the rest of Comp 42.
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Adrienne Tacke

Senior Developer Advocate @ MongoDB

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