>> [MUSIC] Hey folks. My name is Srinivasa Kolluri and
welcome to the beginner series for Azure MySQL.
In this video we will walk through some of
the core concepts for our flexible server offering.
We will start with exploring
customer considerations under MySQL journey.
Along with a brief recap of the flexible server architecture.
We will then step into the core concepts
of our flexible server offering,
and how one could speed up
application development by leveraging these features.
The first step of MySQL customer journey is usually
the research phase where
various solutions are compared on technical merit,
along with the total cost of ownership.
Next is the trial phase,
where one signs up for the service,
followed by the onboarding phase.
If a satisfactory trial happens,
customers will proceed to the planning and the POC phase for
a more thorough evaluation of
the solution, including cost considerations.
Successful POCs lead to performance during phase.
After maximizing performance,
a more broad-based deployment of
production occurs along with expansion.
We have various video modules in our beginner series which will
touch up on all milestones pertaining to a customer journey.
In this module, we will focus our attention on
the research and trial phases by
understanding the core concepts in the Flexible Server offering.
Azure Database for MySQL lets customers focus
on application development rather than database management.
Flexible Server is a fully managed community database with
the lower PCO compared to on-premise MySQL installations.
Flexible Server is easy to set up, operate and scale.
Developers can also take
advantage of the built-in security features.
Bank to market can be reduced by building
apps faster with the Azure ecosystem.
We will only briefly recap the flexible server architecture.
Please refer to the first video in
the series for a deep dive on the architecture.
The flexible server architecture allows
users to opt for high availability,
but then single availability zone and
across multiple availability zones.
The architecture allows for
zone redundant backup stories and
AZ co-location with applications.
Before we proceed to covering the features,
let's spend a few moments to explore cost considerations.
It is important for developers to
budget and focus their Cloud spend.
This can be easily done using the Azure Pricing Calculator tool.
Azure Pricing Calculator provides an easy interface
to calculate one's estimated hourly and monthly costs.
Developers can also save and share cost estimates with
other decision makers in
their company when they sign into the tool.
Let us now navigate to the Pricing Calculator.
As you can see, we have navigated
to the pricing calculator web page.
Let us navigate to the left hand side of
the web page where you'll see the product categories.
I'm going to click on the "Databases" category,
and then navigate to the MySQL bucket.
Once we do that,
we will see that our view estimates button has been created.
We will navigate to the Azure Database for MySQL portion of the page.
The very first thing that I'm going to do is,
change the region in the dropdown.
I'm going to switch to the central use,
and the tool allows for exploring
cost estimates for all available regions.
I will also change the deployment option to
Flexible Server since that is of interest.
I will leave the computing data and
the computing instances unchanged.
We have a separate video where we'll go
into much more detail on these two items.
When it comes to the saving options,
we have three options displayed,
pay as you go, and
the one year and three year reserved instances.
For now, I'll go with the pay as you go model.
Next thing I'm going to do is,
bump up the number of servers from one to three servers,
and I will reduce the number of hours to 100.
I will leave the storage unchanged at
5GB and I'll also leave the IOPS unchanged at zero.
I will leave the storage redundancy options as LRS.
One could also explore GRS while working with the tool.
As you can see, the tool provides a very quick estimate for
three servers that could be run for
about 100 hours with the storage size of 5GB,
and it would cost the developer about
$58.61 in a month for the upkeep of these servers.
As I mentioned, this tool is a great way to budget and
forecast cost estimates very early in the development journey.
Let us now switch back to looking at some of
the core concepts in the Flexible Server offering.
Flexible Server takes snapshot backups of
the data files and stores them in local redundant storage.
The server also performs transaction logs backup,
and stores them in local return and storage.
These backups allow you to restart a server to
any point in time within your configure backup retention period.
The default backup retention period is seven days.
You can optionally configure the database backup from 1-35 days.
All backups are encrypted using
AES256 bit encryption for the data stored at rest.
In Flexible Server,
performing at a store creates
a new server from the original servers backups.
There are two types of restore available.
Point-in-time restore is available with
either backup redundancy option,
and creates a new server in
the same region as the original server.
Geo-restore is available only if you
configured your server for geo-rerun
and storage and it allows you to
restore your server to the geo region.
The estimated time for the recovery of
the server depends on several factors,
such as the size of the databases,
number of transaction logs,
activity and network bandwidth.
Performing a point-in-time restore creates a new server from
the flexible servers backups in
the same region as your source server.
It is created with the original
servers configuration for the computer,
number of weeks, storage size and the backup retention period.
Also tags and settings such as virtual network and
firewall are inherited from the source server.
The restored servers compute and storage here configuration and
security settings can be changed once the restore is completed.
Point-in-time restore is useful in
multiple scenarios such as accidental deletion of data,
when a user drops an important table,
user application accidentally overwrites good data.
You can also choose between the latest restore point,
the customer restore point,
and the fastest restore point.
Flexible Server supports two ways to
configure connectivity to your servers,
and those are the public and private access methods.
In the private access method,
you can deploy a flexible server into your Azure Virtual Network,
Azure Virtual Networks provide
private and secure network communication.
Resources in a virtual network can
communicate through private IP addresses.
In the public access material,
flexible server is accessed through a public endpoint.
The public endpoint is a publicly resolvable DNS enters.
The phrase allowed IP addresses refers to a range of
APIs you can choose to give permission to access your server.
These permissions are called your firewall rules.
We will explore networking in detail in a separate video.
Flexible Server allows configuring
high availability with automatic failover.
The high availability solution is designed to ensure
that committed data is never lost because of failures,
and that the database won't be
a single point of failure in your software architecture.
When you deploy a server with zone
redundant HA two servers will be created,
a primary server and one availability zone,
a standby replica server that has
the same configuration as
the primary server in terms of computer size,
storage and network configuration.
This will be created in
another availability zone of the same Azure region.
You can choose the availability zone for
the primary and the standby replica.
Placing the standby database servers and
standby applications in the same zone reduces latency.
It also allows you to better prepare for
disaster recovery scenarios and zone down scenarios.
We will explore higher availability in
much more detail in other videos.
Flexible Server performs periodic maintenance
to keep your managed database secure,
stable, and up-to-date.
During maintenance, the server gets new features,
updates, and patches.
You can schedule maintenance during a specific day
of the week and the time window within that day,
and specifying preferences for the maintenance schedule.
You can pick a day of the week and the time window.
If you don't specify the system will pick times
between 11:00 PM and 7:00 AM in your server's region time.
You can also define different schedules for
each Flexible Server in your Azure subscription.
Either way, the system will alert you
five days before running any maintenance.
The system will also let you know when maintenance has started,
and when it is successfully completed.
Notifications about upcoming scheduled maintenance
can be emailed to specific addresses.
They can also be sent to Azure Resource Manager roles.
They can be pushed as notifications down Azure app,
or even as an SMS to mobile devices.
Lastly, let us look at monitoring.
The MySQL engine provides many different server variables and
parameters that can be used to configure and tune engine behavior.
Some parameters can be set dynamically during runtime,
while others are static,
requiring a server restart in order to apply.
Azure Database for MySQL
exposes the ability to change the value of
various MySQL parameters using the Azure Portal or the Azure CLI.
You can manage your parameters using the server parameters.
The server parameters are configured with
the default and recommended value when you create the server.
The server parameter played on the Azure Portal shows
both the modifiable and non-modifiable server parameters.
The non-modifiable parameters are grayed out.
The list of supported server parameters is constantly growing.
Use the Server Parameters tab in the Azure Portal to
view the full list and configure the server parameter values.
Flexible Server provides various metrics to
understand how your workload is performing,
and based on this data,
you can understand the impact on your server and applications.
Metrics are numerical values that describe
some aspect of the resources of your server at a particular time.
Monitoring your servers resources helps you troubleshoot and
optimize your workload by allowing
you to monitor what matters the most to you.
Monitoring the right metrics helps you keep the performance,
reliability and availability of your server and applications.
For example, in Flexible Server you can monitor hosts CPU percent,
active connections, IO percent,
and host memory percent to
identify when there is a performance impact.
From there, you may have to optimize
your workload scale vertically by changing computing TS,
scaling horizontally by using read replicas.
All Azure metrics have a one minute frequency,
and each metric provides 30 days of history.
You can also configure alerts on the metrics.
To learn more about Flexible Server,
please visit our Flexible Server
from MySQL page on.startmicrosoft.com.
Check out the Flexible Server Intro article
on techcommunity.Microsoft.com.
We have wonderful case studies of companies using
Flexible Server on ourcustomers.Microsoft.com page.
We also have multiple blogs published from
Flexible Server on Azure.Microsoft.com.
Last but not the least,
visit our free trial page,
link in the description to start your free trial.
Also, please reach out to us via email and
follow us on our official Twitter handle for many more updates.
As always, thanks for joining us and hope to see you soon. [MUSIC]