Scaling your CIAM with Managed RDBMS for Resiliency

An important cloud native design principle is “Resiliency”.  A resilient system embraces failure instead of trying to prevent it.  A resilient database service that is sharded, replicated, and multi-region is hard to build.  In the long term, it is also hard to train and retain database experts to operate it. 

Another challenge to implement Resiliency is failing gracefully, e.g. handling high load by slowing down, not crashing. Use cases for digital identity can be “bursty.” Some typical use cases: seasonal shopping patterns like Black Friday, deadlines like filing taxes, and events like pay-per-view sports. To handle burstiness, database services must scale elastically up–and down.

Enterprise organizations want to focus on business value, not infrastructure. The less time we spend talking about databases, the better! We just want the database to work. We especially don’t want to get dragged into a marathon “the production database is down” Zoom meetings. 

For all the above reasons and in the spirit of cloud native design principles, Gluu decided that we needed to support cloud databases. Cloud providers like Google or Amazon have economies of scale to remove some of the care-and-feeding requirements for databases. Persistence is becoming a commodity infrastructure.

Previously, Gluu supported two database options for both Community Edition (“CE”) and Cloud Native Edition (“CN”): LDAP and Couchbase. We will continue to support both of these in both CE and CN. However, Gluu has recently added support for  Amazon Aurora and Google Spanner for many of its products, providing maximum flexibility without locking you in. Check your product matrix to find out if it’s available for your distribution. 

Aurora is a cloud database service based on MySQL. Spanner is a truly horizontally scalable database service that is SQL-like. So your organization’s existing DBA’s will find these two databases familiar and you can support over 10k OpenID Connect authorization code flow transactions/second.

Already a Gluu user? Talk to us about how to move to a cloud native design and leverage Aurora or Spanner databases.