{"id":2134,"date":"2016-09-13T19:46:29","date_gmt":"2016-09-13T19:46:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/reallifecode\/index.php\/2016\/09\/13\/deploying-a-database-as-a-service-with-graph-story-ansible\/"},"modified":"2020-03-15T07:01:08","modified_gmt":"2020-03-15T14:01:08","slug":"deploying-a-database-as-a-service-with-graph-story-ansible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/ise\/deploying-a-database-as-a-service-with-graph-story-ansible\/","title":{"rendered":"Deploying a DBaaS to Azure with Graph Story and Ansible"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who is Graph Story?<\/h2>\n

Graph Story is a startup based out of Memphis, Tennessee that offers fully-managed Neo4j<\/a> databases as a service. Neo4j is one of the most popular graph database implementations, providing rich features to support machine learning and intelligence through relationships. Rather than users hosting and maintaining a Neo4j database themselves, they can leverage the Graph Story service and avoid the hassle of database management.<\/p>\n

Enabling Azure Support for Graph Story<\/h2>\n

Knomos<\/a> is a startup that is part of the Microsoft Accelerator<\/a> winter 2016 class. They wanted to use Graph Story instead of hosting their own Neo4j server. However, they wanted their Graph Story managed database to run within Azure.<\/p>\n

When we first worked with Graph Story, their database service had a variety of cloud vendors, but their Azure support was lacking. Graph Story, Knomos and Microsoft got together for one week in Seattle, Washington, to enable Graph Story\u2019s database-as-a-service (DBaaS) on Azure.<\/p>\n

Our goal was to make Graph Story\u2019s automated database deployments to Azure consistent with the way they deploy to Digital Ocean, AWS and Google Compute Engine. Graph Story leverages Ansible<\/a>, an application provisioning and deployment platform. With Ansible, DevOps engineers can provision and deploy apps similarly across different cloud platforms. In addition to working with Graph Story and Knomos, we also contributed to the Ansible project to enable the scenarios required by Graph Story.<\/p>\n

Graph Story Deployment Strategy<\/h2>\n

Custom Image Creation & Deployment<\/h2>\n

Graph Story has a custom virtual machine image they use for their database nodes. In order for the image to work globally, they need to deploy each image to every Azure region they intend on supporting. The graphic below depicts how this works:<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

First a Gearman<\/a> worker picks up the request for a new image to be created. The Ansible server is triggered via SSH to execute an Ansible playbook<\/a> which uses 3 modules:<\/p>\n