We are thrilled to announce the GA of three features: IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Endpoints (VPE) for VPC, Horizontal Scaling of PostgreSQL and Horizontal Scaling of DataStax.
These features enhance security and availability capabilities of our data services.
Virtual Private Endpoints for VPC
Virtual Private Endpoints (VPE) for VPC support is the evolution of IBM Cloud Service Endpoints. IBM Cloud VPE for VPC allows you to connect to supported IBM Cloud services from your VPC network by using the IP addresses of your choosing, allocated from a subnet within your VPC.
VPEs are virtual IP interfaces that are bound to an endpoint gateway created on a per-service or per-service-instance basis (depending on the service operation model). The endpoint gateway is a virtualized function that scales horizontally, is redundant and highly available and spans all availability zones of your VPC. Endpoint gateways enable communications from virtual server instances within your VPC and IBM Cloud service on the private backbone. VPE for VPC gives you the experience of controlling all the private addressing within your cloud.
To learn more about VPE, check out the documentation. To get started with using VPE for IBM Cloud Databases, you can review this documentation.
You can also review our most recent blog: “Creating Virtual Private Endpoints with Terraform.”
Horizontal scaling of PostgreSQL and DataStax
PostgreSQL
Customers may scale IBM Cloud Databases for PostgreSQL by adding members to their database instance. As discussed here, PostgreSQL is deployed as a leader and follower within two out three zones of an IBM Cloud Multi-Zone Region (MZR.) With this feature, customers can now effortlessly add followers in-region to improve fault tolerance of their database.
For example, if you add one member to your PostgreSQL databases, you will now have fault tolerance across three data centers in an MZR instead of two data centers. Followers cannot serve read requests and are solely available as asynchronous database members that are automatically promoted to leader in case of an event in the leader’s zone. No other action from the user is required to get the benefit of increased fault tolerance outside of scaling their PostgreSQL instance horizontally by following these instructions.
This feature is in addition to Read Replicas, which can be deployed in the same region as the source database or any other IBM Cloud Region (up to five Read Replicas are allowed). Read Replicas can serve read requests and be promoted to new databases, but they are not eligible for automatic leader election of the source database.
DataStax
Customers may scale IBM Cloud Databases for DataStax instances to up to 20 nodes by adding members to their cluster. Datastax (built on Apache Cassandra™) is a sharded and clustered database by design. This means adding Members (“Nodes” in Cassandra documentation) to your DataStax cluster is the preferred way to scale your database for application load. IBM Cloud Databases for DataStax handles all the hard work on infrastructure procurement and any operational or technical work, making it easier than ever to grow your DataStax cluster.
Horizontal scaling of DataStax may also improve fault tolerance of your database (like for PostgreSQL) but, more importantly, allows for additional throughput, read and write capacity to your DataStax instance. If you would like to scale your cluster past 20 nodes, please contact IBM Cloud support.