Recommendations for Microsoft Azure

For the complete documentation index see: llms.txt

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This page describes recommendations for deploying Aerospike Database on Microsoft Azure, including operating system selection, VM sizing, networking, persistent disks, local SSDs, shadow device configuration, and fault tolerance.

Operating system

We recommend using the latest Ubuntu Server LTS as it has the most recent optimizations and bug fixes on Azure. You can find Ubuntu through the Azure portal or at this page.

Instance type

Choose VM types based on the namespace storage model, memory requirements, CPU requirements, and network throughput for your workload. For local SSD workloads, evaluate current storage-optimized VM families, such as Lsv3, Lsv4, or newer generations available in your Azure region.

Other VM families can be appropriate when their memory, CPU, storage, and network characteristics match your requirements.

Network setup

By default, machines within the same Virtual Network in Azure can communicate freely with each other. Aerospike uses TCP port 3000 for client traffic, ports 3001 and 3002 for intra-cluster fabric and heartbeat traffic, and port 3003 for administrative access. If database clients are in the same virtual network, they can connect over port 3000 without a separate firewall rule. No Aerospike ports should be open to the internet.

You need a port for SSH access to your instances. The default TCP port is 22.

All instances in Azure are assigned an internal IP address. These internal IP addresses should be used in the mesh heartbeat configuration.

Persistent disks

Azure provides storage in the form of VHD Disks in Storage Account Overview.
Azure limits individual persistent disk performance. To achieve higher performance, you must provision additional disks and use them in parallel. Connecting multiple disks would not exceed the vm’s maximum io limit.
See Azure managed disk types for a list supported disks.

Local SSD

Some Instance types come with local SSDs. This provides extremely good performance, with high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and low latency compared to the persistent disk options. However, these local SSDs are created and destroyed along with the virtual machine instance. In spite of this, the local SSD storage option can be used judiciously with an Aerospike cluster so that the data is always replicated on multiple local SSDs attached to multiple virtual machines in the cluster.

Here is an example configuration snippet:

    storage-engine device {
            device /dev/sdb
    }

Local SSD IOPS are not limited by persistent Disk IOPS allocations or instance IOPS allocations. They have their own allocations.

Shadow device configuration

As noted above, some Azure instance types have local SSDs. These can be significantly faster than Premium Storage Disks, as they are network attached. But Azure treats local SSDs as cache and not suitable for long-term data, as these volumes are purged when the instance stops.

To take advantage of local disks with the persistence guarantee of Azure Blob Storage, Aerospike has the Shadow Device configuration for the storage engine.

The write throughput is still limited by the instance limit and storage volume, so this strategy gives good results when the percentage of writes is low.

An example config would be as follows:

  storage-engine device{
    device /dev/sdb  /dev/sdc
    ...
  }

The shadow EBS device must have a size at least equal to the size of the direct-attached SSD. Otherwise, when you try to start your Aerospike cluster, it logs the critical error shadow device <device> is smaller than main device and fails to start. Here is an example of the error message:

May 05 2021 21:31:36 GMT: CRITICAL (drv_ssd): (drv_ssd.c:3290) shadow device /dev/sdc is smaller than main device - 2147483648 < 5368709120

Fault tolerance

Azure has the concept of Availability Sets. It consists of Update Domains and Fault Domains.

Update Domains are groups of physical systems that can be rebooted simultaneously in a maintenance event. Fault Domains are groups of physical systems that share power and network switch.

Aerospike suggests having the Availability Set to be defined with the most number of Update Domains and Fault Domains as possible.
Azure will not give notice of VM reboots for Update Domain interruptions.