Tech Blog

Building clusters in the sky – Exasol Cloud Wizard

In modern day cloud architectures, one of the main priorities for any team is making the configuration and installation as simple and straight forward as possible. The Exasol Cloud Wizard addresses this demand.

The Exasol Cloud Wizard is currently available for Amazon AWSMicrosoft Azure and Google Cloud.

In short it guides you through the installation procedure following these three steps:

  1. Select your desired cloud platform and region
  2. Size your cluster infrastructure based on the amount of raw input data and pick a recommended system setup
  3. Generate your infrastructure as code and feed it to the platform specific deployment tool

Platform and region selection

The first screenshot shows the entry page of the wizard. Here you select your desired cloud platform and the region where you want the Exasol database to be deployed.

Sizing and system recommendations

The next step guides you through the overall sizing configuration.

During this step you can choose between the Simple Sizing Configurator and the Advanced Configurator.

The screenshot above shows the Simple Sizing Configurator. In the left and middle column you can select between predefined configuration options. The first configuration option depends on the raw input data size (e.g. stored as csv file) and the second one on the overall system recommendations. In our example we choose a system that can handle up to 5 TB of raw input data. From the recommended systems we choose the basic configuration which is suitable for any use case without specific demands on concurrency and high compute power. On the left hand side you then get a summary of resulting cluster attributes. Those are for example type and number of cluster nodes, the overall virtual CPUs and memory, the storage capacity.

The second screenshot shows the Advanced Sizing Configurator. Here you choose from a broader selection of instance types, which switch between Exasol Single Node and the Cluster version, or change the underlying license model. By default the pay-as-you-go license is selected. But if you already acquired a license you can use that by choosing the bring-your-own-license model. You can create up to 64 cluster nodes. As part of the automated validation the configurator prevents imbalances between the desired raw input data size and the cluster size.

Summary and deployment templates

After you configured your cluster, you continue with the deployment in the third and final step.

On the summary page you get a final overview of your overall cluster configuration. You can now either directly proceed with the deployment by clicking on one of the launch buttons. Or you can download the pre-populated templates and run the deployment at a later point in time. If you want to continue directly with the deployment, the configurator forwards you directly to the cloud-specific deployment tool. In our example this is AWS CloudFormation. Here you run the deployment of the configured infrastructure.

Build your own Exasol cluster in the cloud with the Exasol Cloud Wizard

The Exasol Cloud Wizard is a major step forward in conveniently configuring and deploying your infrastructure in the cloud. Try out our new configurator on AWS today and benefit from predefined sizing selections and validated custom configurations.

If you want to learn more, check out the instructions on our documentation portal.

Written by Manuel Hiemer